President sues the IRS and Treasury for ten billion dollars over a leak the contractor is in prison for.

The President of the United States, joined by his two adult sons and his family business, filed suit on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury. The complaint seeks ten billion dollars in damages. The asserted basis is the 2018-to-2020 disclosure, by a contractor, of confidential tax-return data of the President and other high-net-worth taxpayers.

The contractor, Charles Edward Littlejohn, pleaded guilty in 2023 and is currently serving a five-year sentence. The contracting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, had its Treasury contracts canceled three days before this filing. The IRS, since 2024, has implemented procedural reforms responsive to the leak. The chain of accountability for the underlying conduct has, by ordinary measures, run.

The novelty of the filing is structural. The plaintiff is the head of state. The defendants are agencies of the state of which he is head. The President of the United States, in functional terms, runs the IRS. He runs the Treasury. He appoints their leaders. He sets their budgets. He directs their priorities. He is, on Thursday, suing the agencies he runs, for ten billion dollars, in the federal court system administered by the Department of Justice he also runs.

The Department of Justice, in the ordinary case, defends the IRS and the Treasury when they are sued. The complaint is silent on whether the Department of Justice intends to do so here. It is a question the Department of Justice will, by procedural rule, have to answer within sixty days.

The damages theory is reputational. The complaint alleges that the disclosure caused the plaintiffs to be portrayed in a false light. Portrayed in a false light is, in the law of defamation, a recognized category. The disclosure, however, was of true tax data. The data was, on its publication by The New York Times in 2018, accurate. The accuracy of the data is the basis on which Mr. Littlejohn was sentenced. A reputational damages claim arising from the disclosure of accurate financial records, by a contractor against whom criminal sanctions have already attached, is in tension with the doctrine that truth is a defense.

These are issues the court will resolve. The motion to dismiss filings will be substantial. The court, at the prerequisite hearings, will be a court appointed in part by the same plaintiff. The conflict-of-interest analysis is, in the literature, a thing.

A serious country distinguishes between the President’s personal grievances and the President’s official authority. A casual country files them in the same docket.

Calmly documenting the decline.