Trump Demands $10 Billion From Taxpayers For Leaked Tax Returns; His Own Lawyers Get To Decide What He Gets

from the wake-up-babe,-a-new-level-of-corruption-has-been-revealed dept

Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something:

I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.

Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just filed a lawsuit against his own IRS, demanding that taxpayers pay him $10 billion.

Ten. Billion. Dollars.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Miami, claims that Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization were grievously harmed when IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica back in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was caught, prosecuted, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence—the system worked, justice was served, case closed. But apparently that’s not enough for a man whose appetite for grift has no discernible ceiling.

Before we dive into why this lawsuit is weapons-grade insane, let’s establish some context that the complaint conveniently glosses over.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Every major party nominee since Nixon had done so voluntarily. Trump’s excuse? He was being audited and would release them after the audit was complete. Somehow, nearly a decade later, those returns were never officially released. There’s no clear evidence the audit ever existed. The whole thing had the distinct aroma of a man who had something to hide.

In 2020, the New York Times obtained 17 years of Trump’s tax records from Littlejohn. The reporting revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely by reporting chronic business losses. The House Ways & Means Committee later obtained and released some of his returns through proper legal channels.

And the result of all this exposure? Trump won the 2024 election and his net worth has skyrocketed in such an obvious way that, contra Karoline Leavitt’s statement, it would be difficult to find anyone who legitimately believes that Trump isn’t profiting off his Presidency.

According to Forbes, Trump’s wealth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, driven largely by his crypto ventures and the value of Trump Media and Technology Group. So grievous was the harm from this leak that Trump is now richer than he’s ever been.

Which brings us to the lawsuit. Trump is demanding $10 billion—more than his entire current net worth—from the federal government. The federal government he controls and which he’s stocked with cronies.

I need to repeat that. Donald Trump is trying to more than double his personal wealth by simply demanding that the IRS, which he controls, give him $10 billion in taxpayer funds. This goes beyond corruption. You need a different word for this altogether.

Let’s break down the multiple levels on which this is absolutely batshit:

The President is suing his own government. Think about this for a moment. Trump controls the executive branch. The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. The Department of Justice—which would normally defend the government in such lawsuits—is currently headed by an Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General who previously worked as Trump’s personal lawyers and who have repeatedly made it clear that they view their current jobs as still being the President’s personal lawyers. The idea that Trump can file a lawsuit against agencies he controls, staffed with loyalists who seem to believe they work for him personally rather than the American people, is so blatantly corrupt that it puts pretty much all past corruption to shame.

As I wrote last year when Trump demanded a mere $230 million in a similar scheme, this creates a situation where Trump’s own lawyers get to decide whether Trump’s claims should be successful—and potentially how much taxpayer money flows directly into his pocket. The fact that it’s now more than 40 times that amount just demonstrates that his corruption has no upper bound.

The damages claimed are laughable. The complaint lists the horrifying “harm” Trump suffered. Hold onto your hats:

ProPublica published at least 50 articles as a result of Defendants’ unlawful disclosures, many of which contained false and inflammatory claims about Defendants’ confidential tax documents.

And:

Because of Defendants’ wrongful conduct, Plaintiffs were subject to, among many others, at least eight (“8”) separate stories in the New York Times which wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history

Eight. Stories. In the New York Times. That’s apparently worth $10 billion in damages. From the US taxpayer. Trump has probably generated more negative headlines in a single weekend of Truth Social posts.

And if the stories were really defamatory (note: they weren’t) sue those publications for defamation and… see how that goes. Because Trump’s defamation lawsuits have a remarkable track record of getting laughed out of court.

But here—clever, clever, clever—this case need never go to court. The IRS and the DOJ (both run by Trump loyalists) can just “settle” and hand over however much taxpayer money Trump wants.

The complaint undermines itself. In a truly galaxy-brained move, Trump’s lawyers included this gem from Littlejohn’s deposition:

When asked, “so you were looking to do something to cause some kind of harm to him?” Mr. Littlejohn responded, “Less about harm, more just about a statement. I mean, there’s little harm that can actually be done to him, I think. . . He’s shown a remarkable resilience.”

They put this in their own complaint. The guy who leaked the documents, when asked under oath whether he intended to cause harm, essentially said “nah, you can’t really hurt that guy.” And Trump’s lawyers thought this helped their case.

Or… they knew that it doesn’t matter how bad the complaint actually is because Trump is effectively playing both sides, and that means the side the benefits Trump personally (at the expense of the American taxpayer) is almost certain to win out.

Isn’t it great the Roberts Supreme Court said there’s nothing the courts can do to stop this?

The legal theory is absurd. The complaint argues that the IRS should have known Littlejohn would leak documents because… the Treasury Inspector General had warned about “security deficiencies” in the IRS’s data protection systems. By this logic, any time any government system has any vulnerability, taxpayers should be on the hook for billions if that vulnerability is ever exploited. It’s malpractice dressed up in legal formatting.

The complaint also leans heavily on politicized language that has no place in a legal filing:

From May 2019 through at least September 2020, former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, who was jointly employed by the IRS and/or one of its contractors, illegally obtained access to, and disclosed Plaintiffs’ tax returns and return information to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other leftist media outlets.

“Leftist media outlets.” In a legal complaint. Filed by a sitting president. Against his own government. Demanding $10 billion. This is a political document, rather than a serious legal complaint. Because, again, the legal stance here makes no difference. There is no adversarial process. Only Trump’s insatiable desire to take people’s money.

This is especially rich given everything else happening. This lawsuit lands at a time when Trump’s administration is gutting the IRS’s enforcement capabilities, when the DOJ has been transformed into Trump’s personal law firm, and when the government is lurching from shutdown to shutdown. But sure, let’s cut Donald Trump a check for ten billion dollars because reporters wrote stories about his taxes—taxes he refused to release voluntarily despite decades of precedent (and which also, once leaked, didn’t appear to do him the slightest bit of political damage).

For all the talk about cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the president himself is attempting to walk off with enough taxpayer money to fund the entire National Endowment for the Arts for the next 60 years.

And the most galling part? Every other presidential candidate in modern history released their tax returns willingly. Trump’s entire complaint rests on the premise that he was harmed by the public learning information that every other candidate simply… disclosed. The audacity of claiming $10 billion in damages for being forced into a transparency that was voluntary for everyone else is genuinely breathtaking.

Littlejohn broke the law. He knew it, he did it anyway, and he’s paying for it with five years of his life. Some have argued he was a whistleblower serving the public interest; others say a law is a law. But none of that matters here, because what Trump is doing has nothing to do with justice or compensation for actual harm.

This is a sitting president attempting to use the legal system to transfer $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury—which belongs to the American people—into his personal bank account. The case will be litigated by a Justice Department stuffed with his former personal attorneys. The damages he claims are fantastical. The harm he allegedly suffered resulted in him getting richer than ever and winning re-election.

So yes, Karoline, you’re right: this is absurd. Just not in the way you meant.

Filed Under: charles littlejohn, corruption, doj, donald trump, irs, tax returns, wtf, wtf is this i don’t even