 "Trump sues IRS, Treasury Dept for $10 billion over tax return leak")
US President Donald Trump on Thursday sued the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department for a whopping $10 billion over the disclosure of this tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020. In a complaint filed in Miami federal court, his two eldest sons and his namesake company dragged the two American government bodies.
They claimed that the two agencies failed to take “mandatory precautions” to prevent former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from leaking their tax returns to “leftist media outlets” including the New York Times and ProPublica.
“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 complaint read. It is pertinent to note that the IRS is part of the Treasury Department. Neither agency immediately responded to requests for comment after business hours.
The timing of it all
Meanwhile, a spokesperson from 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 Organisation to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.”
“President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,” the spokesman averred. It is pertinent to note that the lawsuit was filed just three days after the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had cancelled all of his department’s contracts with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
He accused the company’s contractor, Littlejohn, of stealing and leaking confidential tax returns. It is also noteworthy that 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. At that time, he admitted to leaking Trump’s tax records to The New York Times.
Quick Reads
View AllHe also admitted to leaking records about wealthy individuals to the news outlet ProPublica. The news lawsuit pointed out that Littlejohn, in a 2024 deposition, admitted disclosing “Trump information [that] included all businesses that he had owned” to the investigative news outlet ProPublica. The suit maintained that ProPublica’s subsequent reporting on Trump’s tax documents falsely claimed that the records contained “versions of fraud.”
With inputs from Reuters.
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