Donald Trump has sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department after an agency contractor leaked his tax returns, revealing that he hadn’t paid income tax for a decade—but his lawsuit isn’t likely to stand up to scrutiny.
In court documents filed late Thursday, Trump demanded that the agencies cough up a minimum of $10 billion in damages that would be paid out on the taxpayers’ dime. But there are several issues with the suit itself that raise questions about whether or not the case can be litigated at all.
Firstly, Trump, in a personal capacity, is suing the IRS and the Treasury for a breach that occurred between May 2019 and September 2020. The problem: the breach occurred during the first Trump administration, when Trump himself was in charge of governing those institutions.
Further still, the bulk of the 27-page complaint appears to have passed the statute of limitations. As Ed Whelan, the former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, noted online, the first claim in Trump’s complaint must be brought “within two years after the date of discovery” by the offended party.
“Trump knew of the leaks back in 2020. The complaint feebly tries to get around this problem by contending that Trump and his fellow plaintiffs ‘were not able to bring an action against an unknowable, indeterminate defendant to vindicate their rights’ until they were notified of criminal charges against Littlejohn,” Whelan wrote, referring to Charles Littlejohn, the accused contractor.
Littlejohn is currently serving five years in prison for the breach, which he plead guilty to in 2023.
“But Littlejohn isn’t the defendant. Treasury and IRS are,” Whelan observed. “And Trump knew back in 2020 that they had allowed the allegedly unlawful leaks. So that claim is time-barred.”
Trump is suing the government in conjunction with his two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as the Trump Organization.
“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” the lawsuit states.
The second claim listed in the lawsuit, which relates to the Privacy Clause, similarly expired, according to Whelan.
“Seems to me that it wasn’t long ago that conservatives decried vexatious litigants and those who tried to fleece American taxpayers,” Whelan snarked.
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