Trump Sues IRS for $10B Over Tax Leaks
President Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and his family business sued the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department over alleged leaks of their confidential tax information, court records showed Thursday.The plaintiffs seek at least $10 billion in damages, according to the lawsuit in Miami federal court. The case has been assigned to Judge Kathleen Williams, who was appointed to the U.S. district court bench by former President Barack Obama.
In August, Williams issued a temporary injunction that halted further expansion of the federal government’s Florida immigrant detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” effectively shutting it down. A federal appeals court later blocked Williams’ ruling.
The civil complaint filed Thursday alleges that the IRS and Treasury failed in their obligation to prevent the leak of those tax records by former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn in 2019 and 2020 who worked under Biden.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team told 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 Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.”
The suit was filed three days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had canceled all of his department’s contracts with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in connection with the company’s contractor, Littlejohn, stealing and leaking confidential tax returns.
Littlejohn, 40, is serving a five-year prison sentence after having pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of disclosure of tax return information.
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Littlejohn’s acts were described by one federal prosecutor, as “one of the most serious crimes in the IRS’s history,” and the federal judge who sentenced Littlejohn described it as “an intolerable attack on our constitutional democracy.”
