Trump demands $10 billion from US Treasury and Internal Revenue Service over data leak

The US President Donald Trump and his two sons have filed a lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department, accusing them of leaking their tax returns.

This is reported by the BBC.

The plaintiffs are Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and the Trump Organization. The lawsuit alleges that the agencies failed to prevent the disclosure of personal and business tax information by former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn.

The contractor pleaded guilty in 2023 to stealing tax records from Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024. The lawsuit states that he “used access to unmasked tax records for his own political purposes”, believing himself above the law.

According to the Trump family, Littlejohn leaked the information because he considered Trump "dangerous" and "a threat to democracy", and the release of the information was necessary due to political norms.

In the lawsuit, Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization claim that the leaks to The New York Times and ProPublica caused them serious reputational and financial harm, as well as “public humiliation”. They argue that the publications unfairly damaged the companies’ business reputations and misrepresented their businesses.

The Trump family says the IRS and Treasury Department were obligated to protect tax information but failed to do so. The lawsuit also notes that Trump formally withdrew from his company and hundreds of related entities in 2017, before the start of his first term as president.

• Before the 2016 election, Trump refused to release his tax returns, saying they were under audit. He did the same before the 2020 election, becoming the first US presidential candidate in nearly 50 years not to release them.
• In September 2020, a few weeks before the election, The New York Times published an investigation that found that Trump paid only $750 in federal taxes in the year he won the election and had not paid taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years. In 2022, Trump himself released his tax returns.

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