(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump on Jan. 29 filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department over leaks of his confidential tax returns during his first term in office.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Southern District of Florida, is seeking at least $10 billion in damages, alleging that the IRS and Treasury violated federal privacy laws.
Trump brought the lawsuit in his personal capacity. His two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, together with the Trump Organization LLC, are also listed as plaintiffs in the filing.
In a 27-page lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege that Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, who worked at the IRS as a government contractor, illegally obtained access to their tax records between 2019 and 2020 and disclosed the information to at least two news outlets, the New York Times and ProPublica.
The suit accused the IRS and Treasury of failing to take mandatory precautions to prevent the breach, citing their role in overseeing employees’ access to and removal of tax records.
It stated that Littlejohn had “staff-like access” to tax returns and confidential tax return information, and that the defendants had the authority to control the detailed physical performance of his work.
According to the filing, Littlejohn admitted to disclosing Trump’s tax records that included all his business holdings to ProPublica, which subsequently falsely reported that the plaintiffs’ leaked confidential tax returns contained “versions of fraud.”
“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,” the suit stated.
Littlejohn had been charged with one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information, pleaded guilty in October 2023, and was sentenced to five years in prison in January 2024.
The former IRS employee allegedly stole tax return information from an IRS database by using “broad search parameters designed to conceal the true purpose of his queries,” according to a Justice Department statement published in 2024.
Prosecutors said that Littlejohn uploaded the data to a private website as a way to avoid IRS protocols, which the agency had put in place to detect and prevent large downloads from its devices or systems, and then saved the stolen tax returns to multiple personal storage devices, including an iPod, before disclosing them to the media.
Trump’s lawsuit stated that the security procedures of the IRS and Treasury were so inadequate that it took three years for the IRS to detect the breach of the plaintiffs’ tax records.
The Epoch Times has reached out to both the IRS and Treasury for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
