In an unprecedented move, President Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leak of his tax information during his first term.
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According to AP News, the lawsuit was filed late last month in a federal court in Florida. Along with the world leader, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are also listed as plaintiffs.
Trump’s lawyers claimed in the lawsuit documents that the leak of both his and the Trump Organization’s tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light.”
The leak further “negatively affected” President Trump and his sons’ “public standing,” the attorneys further alleged.
The lawsuit was filed nearly two years after former IRS contractor Charles Edwardr Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison. He pleaded guilty to leaking the tax information about Trump and others to two news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
The news outlets were not identified in the charging documents. However, The New York Times previously published a report about Trump’s taxes in 2020. It was revealed that Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in the year he entered the White House.
In the legal documents, Trump’s lawyers stated the damages the president endured from the leak were “irreparable.”
“[The IRS] had a duty to safeguard and protect plaintiffs’ confidential tax returns and related tax return information from such unauthorized inspection and public disclosure,” the documents read.
President Trump Said He Is Planning to Donate the Money He Wins in the IRS Lawsuit to Charity
During a recent interview with NBC Nightly News, President Trump announced that he will donate all funds he receives from the IRS lawsuit.
“Any money that I win, I’ll give it to charity, 100% to charities,” he stated. “Charities that will be approved by government or whatever.”
A spokesperson for Trump’s outside legal counsel has also released a statement about the IRS lawsuit.
“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,” the statement reads. “Which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
Democratic California Senator Adam Schiff said he is exploring “all options” to prevent Trump from collecting any money from the IRS lawsuit. However, he would need the support of the Congressional Republicans.
“You have to give him a perverse kind of credit for the sheer audacity of the scam,” Schiff recently stated. “It’s just in-your-face.”