US President Donald Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, alleging that it leaked the president’s personal tax information to the news outlets. Citing “reputational and financial damage”, he claimed the data leak between 2018 and 2020 as the reason for his loss in the 2020 presidential elections.The lawsuit filed against the federal agencies in a Miami federal court on Thursday also includes two of Trump’s eldest sons, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and his organisation.As per the lawsuit, the leak of confidential tax information caused “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.”It also states that the information disclosure by a former contractual employee of the IRS “caused reputational and financial harm to Plaintiffs and adversely impacted President Trump’s support among voters in the 2020 presidential election.”Announcing the lawsuit, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent claimed that the firm managing the analytics “failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.”This comes as the US treasury department announced cutting contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, a defence and national security tech firm that was employing the whistleblower when the tax records were leaked.In 2024, Charles Edward Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor, was sentenced to five years in prison after he was found guilty of leaking tax information involving Trump and thousands of the country’s wealthiest people to news outlets.This led to The Times publishing the reports of Donald Trump not paying the federal income tax for many years before 2020. In addition, ProPublica was also able to list out a series of inconsistencies in Trump’s records in 2019. These were believed to have affected Trump’s run in the 2020 presidential elections.