US President Donald Trump and his two sons have filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against the federal government over leaks of their business and personal tax returns.
The civil complaint, filed in Miami federal court, seeks $10bn (£7.25bn) in damages.
The Trump family accuses the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – the US-wide tax body – and the Treasury Department of failing to prevent the disclosure of “confidential, personal financial information” by a former IRS contractor.
The contractor, Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, is serving a five-year prison sentence after being convicted of leaking the tax disclosures to US media outlets.
Ahead of the 2016 election, Trump said he would not release his tax returns because he was under audit, making him the first in almost 50 years to not disclose the documents. He said the same ahead of his 2020 re-election run.
But then in September 2020, just before the November election, The New York Times published an extensive report on Mr Trump’s tax returns, revealing he paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.
Two years later – in 2022 – Trump released the documents himself.
The lawsuit states that both the IRS and Treasury Department “had a duty to safeguard and protect” such disclosures from being shared publicly but “failed to take such mandatory precautions”.
Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and the Trump Organization said in the lawsuit that they suffered reputational and financial harm, along with public embarrassment from leaks to the New York Times and ProPublica, which “unfairly tarnished” their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light and negatively affected their public standing, according to the filing.
Littlejohn pleaded guilty in 2023 to stealing tax data from Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans while working as a contractor for the IRS. In 2024, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
The lawsuit accuses him of weaponising his access to “unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law”.
“Littlejohn committed these crimes because he considered President Trump to be ‘dangerous’ and a ‘threat to democracy,’ and that disclosure was, in Littlejohn’s view, necessary due to political ‘norms,'” the lawsuit says.
When asked in a deposition if Littlejohn was looking to cause some kind of harm to Trump, he said: “Less about harm, more just about a statement. I mean, there’s little harm that can actually be done to him, I think. . . He’s shown a remarkable resilience.”
Trump resigned from his namesake company and hundreds of affiliated entities in 2017 before taking office during his first term.
By BBC News
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