US President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department seeking a staggering $10 billion over the disclosure of this tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020.
In a complaint filed in Miami federal court, his two eldest sons and his namesake’s company dragged the two American government bodies.
They alleged that the two agencies neglected the use of “mandatory precautions” to prevent former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from leaking their tax returns to “leftist media outlets” including the New York Times and ProPublica.
The complaint reported, “Defendants have caused plaintiffs’ reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump and the other plaintiffs’ public standing.”
It is also relevant to say that the IRS belongs to the Treasury Department. Neither of the agencies had a direct response to the request for comment after business hours.
A spokesperson from Trump’s legal team informed CNBC in a statement, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organisation to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.”
The spokesman averred, “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
It becomes relevant to mention that the suit was brought in by only three days following an announcement by the US Treasury Secretary Scott Besset that he cancelled all of the government’s contracts with one consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton.
He alleged that the contractor of the company, Littlejohn, stole and leaked confidential tax returns. Another notable aspect is that Littlejohn is serving a five-year prison term after he confessed in October 2023 to one count of disclosure of tax return information. During the same period, he confessed to the leakage of Trump’s tax records to The New York Times.
He has also confessed to giving records to the news outlet ProPublica on wealthy individuals. The news suit indicated that Littlejohn, in a 2024 deposition, acknowledged, “Trump information [that] included all businesses that he had owned” to the investigative news outlet ProPublica.
The lawsuit has argued that the next time ProPublica reported on Trump and his tax records, it falsely asserted that the records had “versions of fraud.”
