Trump sues US Internal Revenue Service over alleged leak of his tax returns - Fox News

According to a representative of Trump’s legal team, a "dishonest and politically motivated" Internal Revenue Service employee allegedly disclosed confidential information related to Donald Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization. The information was allegedly provided to The New York Times and ProPublica.

The lawsuit claims the disclosure was unlawful and caused harm to millions of people by violating federal privacy protection laws.

The contractor at the center of the leak, Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information and is serving a five-year prison sentence.

Littlejohn admitted to stealing and leaking Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times and to disclosing confidential tax information about wealthy individuals to ProPublica.

According to the lawsuit, in testimony given in 2024, the defendant said that all Trump-related materials he passed on contained information covering Trump’s entire portfolio of business assets.

Earlier, Fox News reported that Littlejohn had refused to testify before the US Congress, invoking his Fifth Amendment right as part of an appeal of his conviction.

A June 2025 press release from the House Judiciary Committee said prosecutors from the US Department of Justice described Littlejohn’s disclosures as "unprecedented in scale and scope."

Other incidents in US

In December, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, alleging defamation over a Panorama documentary aired a week before the 2024 presidential election.

Separately, reports also emerged of a possible data leak in the US. Earlier this month, Politico wrote that in the summer of 2025, the acting head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency uploaded internal documents to a public version of ChatGPT.