U.S. President Donald Trump observes a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 29, 2026.
Brendan Smialowski AFP | Getty Images
President Donald Trump, his two eldest sons, and his family business have sued the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department for allegedly leaking confidential tax information, court records revealed Thursday.
The plaintiffs are seeking at least $10 billion in damages, according to the lawsuit in Miami federal court.
The case was 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 preliminary injunction blocking further expansion of the federal immigration detention facility in Florida, known as Alligator Alcatraz, effectively shutting it down. A federal appeals court subsequently blocked Williams’ sentence.
A civil complaint filed Thursday alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department failed in their duties to prevent the disclosure of tax records by former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn in 2019 and 2020.
Plaintiffs include Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, which is run by his sons.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told CNBC in a statement: “The IRS wrongly allowed corrupt, politically motivated employees 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 then illegally made it available to millions of people.”
“President Trump continues to hold accountable those who have wronged America and Americans,” the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit was filed three days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced he was canceling all Treasury contracts with consulting firms. booze allen hamilton In connection with the theft and leakage of confidential tax returns by Littlejohn, a contractor for the company.
Littlejohn, 40, is serving a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in October 2023 to leaking tax return information.
He admitted to leaking President Trump’s tax records to the New York Times and also admitted to leaking records about wealthy individuals to the investigative news organization ProPublica.
According to the new lawsuit, Littlejohn admitted in a 2024 deposition that he disclosed “Trump information, including all businesses he owned,” to ProPublica.
The complaint alleges that ProPublica’s subsequent reporting on Trump’s tax documents falsely claimed that the records contained “versions of fraud.”
This quote, which does appear in ProPublica’s October 2019 report, is attributed to Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wallace was one of more than a dozen real estate experts interviewed by ProPublica who said he could find no clear explanation for “multiple discrepancies in the document,” according to the report.
“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly harmed their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and adversely affected the social standing of President Trump and the other Plaintiffs,” the complaint says.
It is unprecedented for a sitting president to sue his own administration, and the exorbitant amount of damages sought raises a number of questions regarding conflicts of interest.
However, Trump has reportedly made similar moves recently, with The New York Times reporting in October that Trump had asked the Justice Department for $230 million in compensation for past investigations into him.
