In Trump v. Trump administration, is Trump sure to win?
It’s the case of Trump versus the Trump administration.
In perhaps the most extraordinary of his often extraordinary legal actions, President Donald Trump has sued his own administration — specifically, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service, both of which he oversees — for $10 billion. Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and their family business, the Trump Organization, claim the IRS violated federal privacy laws when a contractor leaked the president’s personal tax documents to the press.
It is the first time a sitting U.S. president has sued his own government.
The president is in the unusual dual position of plaintiff and, in essence, defendant. He could order the treasury secretary, the IRS commissioner and the attorney general, who typically defends the government in litigation, to settle the case. He also could fire them if they don’t.
The lawsuit stems from leaks of tax information between 2018 and 2020 to two news organizations, The New York Times and ProPublica. The Times used the material to report that Trump, who has often touted his status as a billionaire, paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, when he first ran for president, and the same amount the following year after he took office.
Unlike every other president since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, Trump refused to release his personal income tax returns either before or after he was elected.
A contract employee at the IRS, Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty in 2023 to illegally disclosing the tax information. Prosecutors called the leak “unparalleled in the IRS’s history.”
Littlejohn is serving a five-year sentence at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.
An unprecedented case
Like many of Trump’s legal actions— such as the number of defamation cases he filed against the press since returning to office last year — this move is unprecedented.
The lawsuit raises ethical questions for the Justice Department, where attorneys will have to decide how hard to push back with Trump — or, whether to simply settle.
“What appears novel and unprecedented is a sitting president personally suing the federal government itself,” Allen Mendenhall, a senior advisor at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative, told Straight Arrow News. “[T]he plaintiff is the chief executive, and the defendants are agencies subject to his supervisory authority.”
“If the DOJ defends the IRS and Treasury, it would do so under an AG who serves at the president’s pleasure, raising separation of powers questions even within a single branch of government,” Mendenhall said. “Layered on top of these dynamics are sovereign immunity issues and threshold questions about whether and how such a suit may proceed.”
If Trump and the defendants settled, or if a trial ended with a verdict in his favor, the payout would come from taxpayers’ dollars.
Although Trump had not previously sued the government while in office, he did submit a claim through an administrative procedure last year in which he is seeking $230 million from the Justice Department as compensation for investigations in which he was targeted.
At the time, Trump seemed to acknowledge the unusual nature of his demand for payment.
“I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” he said last October.
The closest parallel to Trump’s lawsuit seems to be a case that former President Richard Nixon filed in 1977 over ownership of tapes and documents that related to Watergate, the scandal that ended with his resignation in 1974. He filed multiple lawsuits against the government for taking Pentagon Papers.
Nixon claimed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, which allowed the General Services Administration to take possession of his presidential papers, violated his privacy rights and the separation of powers.
In 2020, six years after Nixon’s death, the government settled the case by agreeing to pay his estate $18 million for materials seized after his resignation.
Mendenhall, of the Heritage Foundation, is certain the Trump case will leave a mark in history.
“However the case is resolved,” he told SAN, “it’s hard to imagine it won’t earn a place in future law school textbooks as an illustration of the legal dynamics at play when personal damages and official authority collide at the highest level of the American constitutional system.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
