President Trump and his sons sued the IRS and Treasury for $10 billion over a tax-return leak

On January 29, 2026, President Donald Trump filed a civil lawsuit in federal court in Florida against the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, seeking at least $10 billion in damages. He filed alongside his two adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization. CNN reported that Trump brought the suit in his personal capacity rather than in his official capacity as president. The complaint concerns the unauthorized disclosure of Trump's federal tax returns, which reached news organizations including The New York Times and ProPublica.

The disclosure was carried out by Charles Littlejohn, a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton who held staff-like access to taxpayer records while working with the IRS. Littlejohn pleaded guilty to the unauthorized disclosure of tax information and was sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison for leaking the returns of Trump and thousands of other individuals. The lawsuit alleges that the IRS and Treasury bear legal responsibility for failing to prevent those disclosures.

A private litigant filing suit against a federal agency is not by itself an abuse of office. What places this filing in the archive is the structural conflict it creates: the defendants are federal agencies, and the Department of Justice -- the executive branch the plaintiff leads as sitting president -- is responsible for defending them. The president stands on both sides of the matter, as the individual plaintiff seeking $10 billion and as the head of the government being sued. The filing itself transferred no public money; it is recorded here as the opening step of a self-dealing sequence rather than a completed one. That sequence reached its resolution on May 18, 2026, when the lawsuit was dismissed at Trump's request and the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" in connection with the settlement -- an outcome recorded separately in the archive. This entry documents the filing as the earliest distinct event in that chain.