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'Disgusting Act of Corruption': Trump Sues IRS, Treasury for $10 Billion Over Tax Return Leak
"While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE."
Jan 30, 2026
President Donald Trump has sued the US Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns during his first term in the White House, when the president broke with decades of tradition by refusing to voluntarily divulge the records.
The lawsuit—joined by Trump's two eldest sons and his family business, the Trump Organization—was revealed Thursday in a filing with the Miami division of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department "caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Donald Trump and the other Plaintiffs' public standing."
Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, pleaded guilty in late 2023 to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information and was later sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The US Treasury Department, led by Scott Bessent, announced earlier this week that it was canceling all of its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, accusing the company of failing 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."
The leak included the tax records of Trump and other mega-rich Americans, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The New York Times, which obtained the records along with ProPublica, reported in 2018 that the returns showed Trump engaged in "outright fraud" and other "dubious" schemes to avoid taxation.
Trump, according to the Times investigation, "paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he was elected president, and... he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years."
US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in response to the president's lawsuit that “Donald Trump is a cheat and a grifter to his core, and for him to abuse his office in an attempt to steal $10 billion from the American taxpayer is a shameless, disgusting act of corruption."
"While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE," Wyden continued. "It is the height of hypocrisy for Trump to pretend he cares one bit about taxpayer privacy."
Journalist Tim O'Brien, who has covered Trump for decades, called the lawsuit "a flagrant and obvious conflict of interest."
"Trump oversees the IRS. He wants the IRS to pay him a big chunk of change," O'Brien wrote on social media. "He is, and always has been, in it for the money."
The lawsuit isn't the first time Trump has sought a large sum of taxpayer money from a federal agency during his second term in office. Last year, Trump demanded via an administrative claims process that the US Justice Department pay him roughly $230 million in compensation for federal investigations he has faced.
Trump launched his attempt to wring $10 billion in taxpayer money out of the Treasury Department and IRS as he and his allies worked to gut the tax agency, leaving it with inadequate staff and resources to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations. The IRS is currently headed by Frank Bisignano, who was named "chief executive officer" of the agency late last year.
In a letter to Bessent and Bisignano earlier this week, Wyden and a group of fellow Senate Democrats warned that "the administration’s plans for the IRS"—including painful budget cuts—"will shift the burden of audits more heavily onto working Americans while giving rich scofflaws and big businesses a green light to cheat on their taxes."
"The administration has failed to detail any serious plan to avoid that unfair outcome," the senators warned.
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'It's Finally Over, I'm Going Home': Biden Grants Commutation—But No Pardon—for Peltier
"The victory of freeing Leonard Peltier is a symbol of our collective strength—and our resistance will never stop," vowed one Indigenous organizer.
Jan 20, 2025
Just minutes before leaving office, Joe Biden on Monday commuted the life prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, the elderly American Indian Movement activist who supporters say was framed for the murder of two federal agents during a 1975 reservation shootout.
"It's finally over, I'm going home," Peltier, who is 80 years old, said in a statement released by the Indigenous-led activist group NDN Collective. "I want to show the world I'm a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me."
While not the full pardon for which he and his defenders have long fought, the outgoing Democratic president's commutation will allow Peltier—who has been imprisoned for nearly a half-century—to "spend his remaining days in home confinement," according to Biden's statement, which was no longer posted on the White House website after Republican President Donald Trump took office Monday afternoon.
🚨BREAKING🚨 Leonard Peltier Granted Executive Clemency After 50 years of unjust incarceration and the tireless efforts of intergenerational grassroots organizing and advocacy, our elder and relative Leonard Peltier has been granted executive clemency.
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— NDN Collective ( @ndncollective.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 9:02 AM
"Tribal Nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials (including the former U.S. attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier's prosecution and appeal), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly support granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his advanced age, illnesses, his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community, and the substantial length of time he has already spent in prison," Biden explained.
Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in U.S. history, said in a statement: "I am beyond words about the commutation of Leonard Peltier. His release from prison signifies a measure of justice that has long evaded so many Native Americans for so many decades. I am grateful that Leonard can now go home to his family. I applaud President Biden for this action and understanding what this means to Indian Country."
Congressman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who last month led 34 U.S. lawmakers in a letter urging clemency for Peltier, said in a statement that "for too long, Mr. Peltier has been denied both justice and the pursuit of a full, healthy life at the hands of the U.S. government, but today, he is finally able to go home."
"President Biden's decision is not just the right, merciful, and decent one—it is a testament to Mr. Peltier's resilience and the unwavering support of the countless global leaders, Indigenous voices, civil rights and legal experts, and so many others who have advocated so tirelessly for his release," Grijalva added. "While there is still much work to be done to fix the system that allowed this wrong and so many others against Indian Country, especially as we face the coming years, let us today celebrate Mr. Peltier's return home."
NDN Collective founder and CEO Nick Tilsen said Monday that "Leonard Peltier's freedom today is the result of 50 years of intergenerational resistance, organizing, and advocacy."
"Leonard Peltier's liberation is our liberation—we will honor him by bringing him back to his homelands to live out the rest of his days surrounded by loved ones, healing, and reconnecting with his land and culture," Tilsen continued.
"Let Leonard's freedom be a reminder that the entire so-called United States is built on the stolen lands of Indigenous people—and that Indigenous people have successfully resisted every attempt to oppress, silence, and colonize us," Tilsen added. "The victory of freeing Leonard Peltier is a symbol of our collective strength—and our resistance will never stop."
Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O'Brien said that "President Biden was right to commute the life sentence of Indigenous elder and activist Leonard Peltier given the serious human rights concerns about the fairness of his trial."
While Peltier admits to having participated in the June 26, 1975 gunfight at the Oglala Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, he denies killing Federal Bureau of Investigation agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams.
As HuffPost senior political reporter Jennifer Bendery recapped Monday:
There was never evidence that Peltier committed a crime, and the U.S. government never did figure out who shot those agents. But federal officials needed someone to take the fall. The FBI had just lost two agents, and Peltier's co-defendants were all acquitted based on self-defense. So, Peltier became their guy.
His trial was rife with misconduct. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into lying. Federal prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated Peltier. A juror acknowledged on the second day of the trial that she had "prejudice against Indians," but she was kept on anyway.
The government's case fell apart after these revelations, so it simply revised its charges against Peltier to "aiding and abetting" whoever did kill the agents—based entirely on the fact that he was one of dozens of people present when the shootout took place. Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Joe Stuntz Killsright was also killed at Pine Ridge when a U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs agent sniper shot him in the head after Coler and Williams were killed. Stuntz' death has never been investigated.
Some Indigenous activists welcomed Peltier's commutation while also remembering Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, an Mi'kmaq activist who was kidnapped and murdered at Pine Ridge in December 1975 by her fellow AIM members. Some of Aquash's defenders believe her killing to be an assassination ordered by AIM leaders who feared she was an FBI informant.
Before leaving office, Biden issued a flurry of eleventh-hour preemptive pardons meant to protect numerous relatives and government officials whom Trump and his allies have threatened with politically motivated legal action.
However, the outgoing president dashed the hopes of figures including Steven Donziger, Charles Littlejohn, and descendants of Ethel Rosenberg, who were
seeking last-minute pardons or commutations.
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Biden's Clemency Clock Winds Down for Donziger, Littlejohn, Peltier, and Assange
There are only a few days left for Biden to heed calls for clemency coming from a diverse array of rights groups.
Jan 17, 2025
Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden announced commutations on Friday for approximately 2,500 people who have been convicted of non-violence drug crimes—a move that was cheered by rights groups and brings his total number of pardons and commutations to the highest of any president.
But Biden has so far stopped short of granting clemency to a number of high profile individuals whose cases—while all very different—have generated significant public interest and sympathy. They include: the former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The cases have prompted a flurry of calls from various groups for Biden to take action on the cases before he hands over the White House to President-elect Donald Trump on January 20.
Littlejohn was sentenced in January 2024 to the five years in prison for unauthorized disclosure of tax information to the media. In 2020, The New York Times published a story based on information leaked by Littlejohn revealing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and in 2017. Later, journalists at ProPublica used documents made available by Littlejohn to report on how the wealthiest 25 individuals in America were able to get away with paying very little in income tax between 2014 and 2018.
Given the nature of his case, Kenny Stancil of the Revolving Door Project and Bob Lord of the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in December that Littlejohn "very well could be on Trump's enemies list" and urged Biden to commute his sentence.
"The longer Littlejohn languishes in jail, the more he is at risk of retribution from Trump," wrote Stancil and Lord, who also highlight that Littlejohn was given the statutory maximum sentence for his crime.
On Thursday, millionaire Abigail Disney penned a defense of Littlejohn, writing that Biden should commute his sentence because he "did the nation a great service by spotlighting the urgent need for tax reform in a country being ripped apart by extreme and rising inequality."
Indigenous leaders and the human rights organization Amnesty International are calling for clemency for another man who is currently behind bars: the Indigenous rights activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted in 1977 of having murdered two FBI agents and has spent the majority of his life in prison, despite concerns about the fairness of his trial and conviction.
Peltier had his request for parole and compassionate release denied last year, meaning clemency is "likely his only chance for freedom," according to Amnesty International.
"All of us see a little bit of ourselves in Leonard Peltier, and that's why we fight so hard for him," said Nick Tilsen, the founder and CEO of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group. "This is about paving a path forward that gives us the opportunity to have justice and begin to heal the relationship between the United States government and Indian people. And so, this decision is massive."
Meanwhile, 50 human rights and environmental groups sent a letter in early January to President Biden, urging him to pardon U.S. human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who secured a multibillion settlement for Indigenous plaintiffs against Texaco (later acquired by Chevron) in an Ecuadoran court over the company's destructive oil pollution in the Amazon, but was later charged with criminal contempt of court in the U.S. for withholding evidence in a countersuit brought by Chevron. Donziger was disbarred in 2018, and then spent time in both prison and under house arrest.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who has called for Donziger's pardon, recently told Democracy Now! that "Chevron has spent countless millions and millions of dollars going after Steven Donziger and not helping a single person in Ecuador deal with what they left behind. We have to stand up to corporate excesses in this country."
"If President Biden would pardon him, I think that would be a signal that maybe things are beginning to change," he added.
Also this week, press freedom and civil liberties organizations demanded that Biden pardon WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who last year—as a way to avoid extradition to the U.S. after languishing for years in a British prison—pleaded guilty to a felony charge under the U.S. Espionage Act of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national military documents. Per the terms of the plea deal, he was allowed to return to his native Australia and is no longer incarcerated.
Freedom of the Press Foundation director of advocacy Seth Stern said in a statement Thursday that Assange's case "normalized the criminalization of work national security journalists do every day—talking to sources, obtaining documents from them, and publishing those documents."
"A pardon won't undo the harm the case has done to the free press or the chilling effect on journalists who now know their work can land them behind bars at the whim of the Department of Justice. But it will help reduce the damage," he said.
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