{"id":437949,"date":"2026-01-30T01:55:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T01:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/437949\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T01:55:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T01:55:08","slug":"trump-sons-company-sue-irs-over-tax-records-leak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/437949\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump, sons, company sue IRS over tax records leak"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>US President Donald Trump listens during a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Jan. 29, 2026. <\/p>\n<p>Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images<\/p>\n<p>President <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/donald-trump\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Donald Trump<\/a>, his two eldest sons, and his family business sued the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2026\/01\/28\/irs-tax-season-2026.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Internal Revenue Service<\/a> and the U.S. Treasury Department over alleged leaks of their confidential tax information, court records showed Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>The plaintiffs seek at least $10 billion in damages, according to the <a href=\"https:\/\/storage.courtlistener.com\/recap\/gov.uscourts.flsd.706172\/gov.uscourts.flsd.706172.1.0_3.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">lawsuit<\/a> in Miami federal court.<\/p>\n<p>The civil complaint alleges that the IRS and Treasury failed in their obligation to prevent the leak of those tax records by former IRS employee Charles &#8220;Chaz&#8221; Littlejohn in 2019 and 2020.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to Trump, the plaintiffs are his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, which the sons run.<\/p>\n<p>A spokesman for Trump&#8217;s legal team told CNBC in a statement, &#8220;The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee 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 was then illegally released to millions of people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,&#8221; the spokesman said.<\/p>\n<p>The suit was filed three days after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2026\/01\/26\/trump-tax-records-treasury-cancels-booz-allen-contracts.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent<\/a> said he had cancelled all of his department&#8217;s contracts with the consulting firm <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/quotes\/BAH\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Booz Allen Hamilton<\/a> in connection with the company&#8217;s contractor, Littlejohn, stealing and leaking confidential tax returns.<\/p>\n<p>Read more CNBC politics coverage<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>He admitted to leaking <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/donald-trump\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Trump<\/a>&#8216;s tax records to The New York Times, and also admitted to leaking records about wealthy individuals to the news outlet ProPublica.<\/p>\n<p>The news lawsuit says that Littlejohn, in a 2024 deposition, admitted disclosing &#8220;Trump information [that] included all businesses that he had owned&#8221; to the investigative news outlet ProPublica.<\/p>\n<p>The suit asserts that ProPublica&#8217;s subsequent reporting on Trump&#8217;s tax documents falsely claimed that the records contained &#8220;versions of fraud.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>While that quote does appear in ProPublica&#8217;s October 2019 report, it comes from Nancy Wallace, a finance and real estate professor at the University of California-Berkeley&#8217;s Haas School of Business.<\/p>\n<p>Wallace was one of a dozen real estate professionals interviewed by ProPublica who said they saw no clear explanation for &#8220;multiple inconsistencies in the documents,&#8221; according to the report.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;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&#8217; public standing,&#8221; the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s all but unheard of for a sitting president to sue their own administration, and the exorbitant damages figure being demanded raises various conflict-of-interest questions.<\/p>\n<p>But Trump has reportedly made similar moves in the recent past: The New York Times reported in October that Trump sought <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2025\/10\/21\/trump-doj-settlement-election-classified-documents.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">$230 million <\/a>from the Department of Justice as compensation for its past investigations into him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump listens during a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,28819,1071,122,1072,12,14004,21218,565,10059,3130,3,111,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-437949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-booz-allen-hamilton-holding-corp","tag-breaking-news-politics","tag-business-news","tag-donald-j-trump","tag-donald-trump","tag-eric-trump","tag-government-taxation-and-revenue","tag-jr","tag-laws","tag-lawsuits","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}