Donald Trump’s whizbang libelslander lawyer Alejandro Brito has done it again! This time the president is suing the IRS for $10 billion. It’s like suing himself — only US taxpayers have to pay the bill.
The case involves the unlawful release of Trump’s tax returns in 2020 by Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Littlejohn stole hundreds of thousands of tax documents and leaked them to news outlets like ProPublica, which published articles highlighting the paltry sums the ultra-wealthy contribute to the common wealth. Littlejohn pled guilty in 2023 and was sentenced to five years in prison.
In September of 2020, the New York Times published a series of explosive stories on Trump’s tax returns that highlighted how little he paid in taxes, thanks to write-offs and carried losses. Trump, along with his eldest sons and the family business, claim that these disclosures “incurred substantial financial and other damages, including having to defend against a meritless civil suit brought by the New York Attorney General based on wrongful interpretation of unauthorized disclosures of their confidential tax returns and related tax information.” And so they demand recompense under the Privacy Act and 26 U.S. Code § 7431.
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The case is modeled on a similar suit filed in 2022 by Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, who was represented by Quinn Emanuel, and so it hews more closely to the norms of pleading than Brito’s regular offerings. And yet there may be one or two teensy tiny problems with Trump’s latest complaint.
Like, say, the statute of limitations which expires two years after the discovery of the disclosure. Trump says that the first he heard of it was January of 2024 when the Treasury sent him a letter informing him of Littlejohn’s sentencing. This is somewhat undercut by the numerous articles published in 2020 which “wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history” cited in this very complaint as evidence of damages. Trump also cites articles based on the 2022 disclosure of his tax returns by the House Ways and Mean Committee, ’cause YOLO.
Then there’s the theory of liability based on the IRS’s failure to adequately supervise its contractors. Trump crows that Griffin’s suit survived a motion to dismiss because Judge Robert Scola said there was a live dispute as to whether the IRS was responsible for Littlejohn’s crimes. But if Littlejohn was functionally IRS employee in 2020, then his boss was the plaintiff himself … which may complicate matters.
And then there’s the question of damages.
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Trump spent ten years saying he’d be “proud” to release his tax returns.
“I have big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time,” he said on Meet the Press in January of 2016.
Now he says the publication of true information he vowed continually to release himself “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” to the tune of $10 billion.
In any event, Griffin did not win his lawsuit. His Privacy Act claim was dismissed for failure to allege any actual damages, and he settled in 2024 for zero dollars and a public apology. But, of course, Trump has something Griffin didn’t: He controls the entire apparatus of the federal government and can just order the Treasury to loot the public fisc for his own benefit. Indeed, he’s already ordered it to pay him $230 million for the “illegal” raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Funny, he doesn’t want to answer questions about this very legit litigation!
To the extent that it matters, the case has been assigned to Judge Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee. Stipulated settlement in 3…2…
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
