XPost: alt.government.employees, alt.politics.trump, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   XPost: sac.politics   
   From: noreply@mixmin.net   
      
   President Donald Trump, his two eldest sons, and his family business   
   sued the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department over   
   alleged leaks of their confidential tax information, court records   
   showed Thursday.   
      
   The plaintiffs seek at least $10 billion in damages, according to the   
   lawsuit in Miami federal court.   
      
   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 “Chaz” Littlejohn in 2019 and 2020.   
      
   In addition to Trump, the plaintiffs are his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and   
   Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, which the sons run.   
      
   A spokesman for 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 Organization 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 said.   
      
   The suit was filed three days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent   
   said he had cancelled all of his department’s contracts with the   
   consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in connection with the company’s   
   contractor, Littlejohn, stealing and leaking confidential tax returns.   
      
   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.   
      
   He admitted to leaking Trump’s tax records to The New York Times, and   
   also admitted to leaking records about wealthy individuals to the news   
   outlet ProPublica.   
      
   The news lawsuit says 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 asserts that ProPublica’s subsequent reporting on Trump’s tax   
   documents falsely claimed that the records contained “versions of   
   fraud.”   
      
   While that quote does appear in ProPublica’s October 2019 report, it   
   comes from Nancy Wallace, a finance and real estate professor at the   
   University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.   
      
   Wallace was one of a dozen real estate professionals interviewed by   
   ProPublica who said they saw no clear explanation for “multiple   
   inconsistencies in the documents,” according to the report.   
      
   “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 lawsuit says.   
      
   It’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.   
      
   But Trump has reportedly made similar moves in the recent past: The New   
   York Times reported in October that Trump sought $230 million from the   
   Department of Justice as compensation for its past investigations into   
   him.   
      
   https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/trump-sues-irs-and-treasury-for-10-billio   
   n-over-leak-of-tax-records.html   
      
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