president Donald Trumphis two eldest sons and his family business sued IRS The U.S. Treasury Department is suspected of leaking confidential tax information, court records showed Thursday.

Plaintiffs reportedly seek at least $10 billion in damages litigation in federal court in Miami.

The civil lawsuit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department failed to meet their obligations to prevent former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn from leaking these tax records in 2019 and 2020.

In addition to Trump, the plaintiffs include his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, which they run.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told CNBC in a statement, “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.”

“President Trump continues to hold accountable those who have wronged the United States and Americans,” the spokesman said.

The lawsuit was filed three days later Finance Minister Scott Bessant said he had canceled all of his department’s contracts with consulting firms Booz Allen Hamilton In connection with the theft and disclosure of confidential tax returns by Littlejohn, the company’s contractor.

Littlejohn, 40, is serving a five-year sentence after pleading guilty in October 2023 to one count of leaking tax return information.

He admitted to leaking secrets trump cardDisclosed his tax records to the New York Times and admitted leaking records about wealthy individuals to the news outlet ProPublica.

The new lawsuit alleges that Littlejohn admitted in a 2024 deposition to disclosing “Trump information, including all businesses he owned,” to the investigative news outlet ProPublica.

The lawsuit alleges that ProPublica’s subsequent coverage of Trump’s tax documents falsely claimed the records contained a “fraudulent version.”

While this quote does appear in ProPublica’s October 2019 report, it comes from Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Wallace was one of more than a dozen real estate professionals interviewed by ProPublica who said they saw no clear explanation for “multiple inconsistencies in the document.”

“Defendants caused reputational and financial harm to Plaintiffs, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, falsely portrayed them, and negatively impacted the public standing of President Trump and the other Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit states.

It’s almost unheard of for a sitting president to sue his own government, and the exorbitant damages sought raise all sorts of conflict-of-interest issues.

But Trump has reportedly made similar moves recently: The New York Times reported in October that Trump sought US$230 million as compensation for past investigations into him.