President Donald Trump, along with his two older sons and their family business struck back at the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Treasury Department for alleged leaks connected to their confidential tax information, court documents revealed on January 27, 2026. The plaintiffs are looking to snag $10 billion in damages, according to the suit, which was filed in a Miami federal court.
Judge Kathleen Williams will be presiding over the case. Williams was appointed to the U.S. District Court by former President Barack Obama. Judge Williams issued an injunction in August 2025 to temporarily halt the expansion of a federal Florida immigrant detention facility which came to be known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” shutting down its operation. However, a federal appeals court later slapped down that ruling.
The lawsuit filed by Trump and his family accuses the IRS and the Treasury Department of failing in their duty to prevent the leak of tax records by former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn in 2019 and 2020. The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, along with the Trump Organization, join their dad as the plaintiffs in the suit.
In a statement sent to CNBC, a spokesman for the Trump legal team said, “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.” The spokesman added, “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
The lawsuit was filed just three days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed he had severed ties with the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm due to its connection with company contractor, Littlejohn, stealing and then leaking the plaintiffs’ confidential tax returns. For his crimes against the Trumps, Littlejohn, 40, is now serving a five-year sentence in prison. He pleaded guilty in October 2023 to a single count of disclosure of tax return information.
During an interview with the New York Times, Littlejohn confessed to leaking the tax records. And the Trumps weren’t the only ones hit. Littlejohn also released tax documentation from many of the wealthiest folks in the United States to a news publication called ProPublica. The Trump lawsuit states that Littlejohn, in a deposition from 2024, admitted that he disclosed “Trump information that included all businesses that he owned” to ProPublica.
The suit then goes on to say that ProPublica’s reporting on the documents makes false claims that different versions of the tax documents contained fraud. The quote does appear in the October 2019 report, it first came from finance and real estate professor Nancy Wallace, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
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ProPublica interviewed Wallace, along with several other real estate professionals for their report, all of whom stated there was no explanation for “multiple inconsistencies in the documents.” The lawsuit then goes on to say, “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.”