Draft:Trump v. Internal Revenue Service
Pending United States lawsuit
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Trump v. Internal Revenue Service is a lawsuit filed on January 29, 2026, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The plaintiffs, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and The Trump Organization, allege that the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Treasury Department failed to safeguard and protect their confidential tax returns, which were leaked to the New York Times in 2019. The lawsuit is seeking $10 billion in damages, and raises questions of conflict of interest and possible corruption as President Trump is head of the agencies he is challenging in court.
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| Trump v. Internal Revenue Service | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Court | United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida |
| Full case name | Donald J. Trump, et al. v. Internal Revenue Service, et al. |
| Submitted | January 29, 2026 |
| Docket nos. | 1:26-cv-20609 |
| Court membership | |
| Judge sitting | Kathleen M. Williams |
Background
When campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump did not release his tax returns to the public, becoming the only major presidential nominee since 1976 not to do so.[1] At the time, Trump claimed he did not make the returns public because he was undergoing an audit, although the IRS has said that an audit does not prevent anyone from making returns public. After becoming president in 2017, Trump said he might not release the returns until he was out of office.[2]
Despite criticism[3] and widespread public support for their release[4], Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns continued through his first administration. In 2019, the United States House Committee on Ways and Means requested, and later subpoenaed the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service for six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns,[5] kicking off a three-year legal battle which ended in the Supreme Court ruling against Trump in November of 2022.[6]
In 2018, Chaz Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, had surreptitiously acquired a decade and a half’s worth of unmasked taxpayer files. In 2019, Littlejohn turned fifteen years worth of Trump’s tax returns over to the New York Times.[7] In September 2020, the Times published the first of a series of articles detailing the contents of the leak, revealing for the first time that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and that in ten of the previous fifteen years Trump paid no income taxes at all, claiming he lost more money than he made. The report also detailed business arrangements of Trump's that are "in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president."[8]
Littlejohn pled guilty to one count of the unauthorized disclosure of tax return information, and in January 2024 was sentenced to five years in prison, one of the largest sentences handed down in a federal leak investigation.[9]