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The suit, filed in a Florida federal court Thursday, includes
the president's sons Eric Trump and, Donald Trump Jr. and the
Trump organization as plaintiffs.
The filing alleges that the leak of Trump and the Trump
Organization’s confidential tax records caused “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.”
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn of
Washington, D.C. — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense
and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in
prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about
Trump and others to news outlets.
Littlejohn, known as Chaz, gave data to The New York Times and
ProPublica between 2018 and 2020 in leaks that appeared to be
“unparalleled in the IRS’s history,” prosecutors said.
The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest
confidentiality laws in federal statute.
The Times reported in 2020 that Trump did not pay federal income
tax for many years prior to 2020, and ProPublica in 2021
published a series about discrepancies in Trump's records. Six
years of Trump's returns were later released by the
then-Democratically controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Trump's suit states that Littlejohn’s disclosures to the news
organizations “caused reputational and financial harm to
Plaintiffs and adversely impacted President Trump’s support
among voters in the 2020 presidential election.”
Littlejohn stole tax records of other mega-billionaires,
including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The president's suit comes after the U.S. Treasury Department
announced it has cut its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton,
earlier this week, after Littlejohn, who worked for the firm,
was charged and subsequently imprisoned for leaking tax
information to news outlets about thousands of the country’s
wealthiest people, including the president.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time of the
announcement that the firm “failed to implement adequate
safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential
taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with
the Internal Revenue Service.”
Representatives of the White House, Treasury and IRS were not
immediately available for comment.
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