President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit seeking at least $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service, accusing the agencies of causing him financial and reputational damage after his tax returns were leaked during his first term in office. The suit comes as Trump oversees the same agencies he is suing and as his administration advances plans that would significantly weaken federal tax enforcement.
The lawsuit was revealed Thursday in a filing with the Miami division of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Trump is joined in the case by his two eldest sons and the Trump Organization. The complaint alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department “caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Donald Trump and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
The case centers on the unauthorized disclosure of Trump’s tax returns by Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. Littlejohn pleaded guilty in late 2023 to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information and was later sentenced to up to five years in prison. The leak involved Trump’s records as well as the tax information of other wealthy individuals.
The New York Times, which obtained the tax records along with ProPublica, reported that the documents showed Trump engaged in “outright fraud” and other “dubious” schemes to avoid taxation. According to the investigation, Trump “paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he was elected president, and… he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years.” The leaked records also included information related to other billionaires, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Trump’s lawsuit argues that the IRS is legally responsible for Littlejohn’s actions because he had “staff-like access to tax returns and confidential tax return information” and exploited security failures that had gone unaddressed. Trump is suing the IRS and Treasury Department in his personal capacity rather than as president.
Earlier this week, the Treasury Department announced that it was canceling all contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the company failed to “implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.” The decision involved canceling approximately $21 million in federal contracts.
The lawsuit has drawn sharp criticism from congressional Democrats, who argue that Trump is abusing his position for personal gain. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, issued a blistering response to the filing.
“Donald Trump is a cheat and a grifter to his core, and for him to abuse his office in an attempt to steal $10 billion from the American taxpayer is a shameless, disgusting act of corruption,” Wyden said.
Wyden also accused Trump of selectively invoking taxpayer privacy while undermining it elsewhere. “While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE,” Wyden said. “It is the height of hypocrisy for Trump to pretend he cares one bit about taxpayer privacy.”
Journalist Tim O’Brien, who has covered Trump for decades, also criticized the lawsuit, calling it “a flagrant and obvious conflict of interest.” In a social media post, O’Brien wrote, “Trump oversees the IRS. He wants the IRS to pay him a big chunk of change. He is, and always has been, in it for the money.”
The lawsuit is not the first time Trump has sought large sums of taxpayer money from a federal agency during his second term. Last year, he demanded roughly $230 million from the US Justice Department through an administrative claims process related to federal investigations he has faced.
Trump’s legal action comes as his administration moves to reshape the IRS. The agency is currently headed by Frank Bisignano, who was named to the role late last year. At the same time, Trump and his allies have pursued budget cuts and staffing reductions that critics warn would weaken the IRS’s ability to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations.
In a letter sent earlier this week to Bessent and Bisignano, Wyden and other Senate Democrats warned that “the administration’s plans for the IRS” would “shift the burden of audits more heavily onto working Americans while giving rich scofflaws and big businesses a green light to cheat on their taxes.” The lawmakers added that “the administration has failed to detail any serious plan to avoid that unfair outcome.”
As the lawsuit proceeds, it places renewed attention on Trump’s finances, his control over the nation’s tax system, and the consequences of weakening the agency responsible for enforcing tax law against the wealthiest Americans.
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