President Trump Files $10 Billion Lawsuit Against IRS and Treasury Over Leaked Tax Returns
Miami, FL — In an extraordinary legal action that has rocked the 2026 political landscape, President Donald J. Trump has filed a civil lawsuit seeking at least $10 billion in damages against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury for alleged failures to protect his confidential tax records — which were illegally leaked to national news outlets during his first term in office.
Background: How the Leak Happened
The lawsuit stems from a widely-reported breach of confidential tax data between 2019 and 2020, when a former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn stole and distributed private tax information belonging to Trump and thousands of other taxpayers. Littlejohn, a contractor through the defense consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, accessed IRS systems and provided tax return data to multiple media outlets — most prominently The New York Times and the investigative outlet ProPublica.
In 2023, Littlejohn pleaded guilty to a federal felony charge of unauthorized disclosure of tax information and was sentenced in 2024 to five years in federal prison — the maximum penalty under current law.
Public reporting based on the leaked records included a widely shared 2020 New York Times investigation revealing that Trump paid $750 in federal income tax in both 2016 and 2017, and reported little to no income tax in other years. ProPublica also published a series of stories on broader tax reporting trends among the ultra-wealthy, drawing on the same cache of leaked data.
The Legal Claim: What the Lawsuit Alleges
The complaint — filed on behalf of Donald Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization — accuses the IRS and Treasury of failing in their legal obligations to safeguard confidential taxpayer information under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality statutes in U.S. law.
According to court filings and coverage of the complaint:
The government had a clear duty to protect tax returns from “unauthorized inspection and public disclosure.”
Those disclosures, the plaintiffs argue, caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished business reputations, portrayed plaintiffs in a false light, and negatively affected… public standing.”
The lawsuit demands a minimum of $10 billion in damages for federal privacy violations and associated harms.
Trump’s legal team has characterized the suit as an effort to hold the federal government accountable for egregious breaches of taxpayer privacy, arguing that none of the statutory protections designed to prevent such leaks were properly enforced.
Unprecedented Nature of the Lawsuit
Even seasoned legal observers describe the case as unparalleled. It is rare for a federal taxpayer — much less a sitting president — to sue the IRS or Treasury for damages tied to leaked tax data. What makes this matter especially unique is:
The plaintiff is the head of the executive branch. Trump controls the very agencies he is suing.
The lawsuit seeks an extremely high damages figure that critics and legal analysts say will be difficult to substantiate under typical IRS confidentiality remedies, which often provide statutory minimums per disclosure but rarely approach nine-figure verdicts.
Legal experts have warned that the case could trigger “a wave of similar claims” from wealthy individuals who also had confidential tax information exposed, potentially creating massive liabilities for the federal government.
Political and Ethical Controversies
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