WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for President Donald Trump are in talks with the Internal Revenue Service to resolve a $10 billion lawsuit the president filed against his own tax agency over leaks of his tax information to the news media between 2018 and 2020.
In documents filed in federal court on Friday, Trump asked a judge to pause the case for 90 days while the two sides work to reach a settlement or resolution.
“This limited pause will neither prejudice the parties nor delay a final resolution,” the filing said. “Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and enable the parties to explore avenues to effectively narrow or resolve the issues.”
Tax and ethics experts said the lawsuit raises numerous legal and ethical questions, including whether it is appropriate for executive branch leaders to pursue scorched-earth lawsuits against the governments they oversee.
Trump filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida earlier this year, claiming that previously leaked confidential tax records of him and the Trump Organization caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, falsely portrayed them, and negatively impacted the public standing of President Trump and the other plaintiffs.”
The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn of Washington, D.C., who formerly worked for the defense and national security technology company Booz Allen Hamilton, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about President Trump and others to two news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
The outlets are not named in the charging documents, but the descriptions and time frames are consistent with reporting by The New York Times on Trump’s tax returns and by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism group, on the taxes paid by wealthy Americans. A 2020 New York Times report found that Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes during his first year in the White House, and some years paid no income taxes at all due to huge reported losses.
Asked in February how he would handle any damage the case might cause, Trump said: “I think what we’re going to do is do something for charity.”
“We could make a lot of money,” he said at the time. “No one will care because it’s going to a lot of really good charities.”
Several ethics watchdog groups have filed amicus briefs challenging the president’s lawsuit.
A February filing by the watchdog group Democracy Forward noted that the case is “unusual because the president controls both parties, raising the possibility of collusive litigation tactics” and that “the conflict of interest raises uncertainty about whether the Justice Department will be as zealous in defending the public treasury as it has been against other plaintiffs claiming related matters.”
