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Celerity

(54,010 posts) Tue Feb 3, 2026, 08:00 PM Feb 3

Trump Demands $10 Billion in Taxpayers' Money

Today on TAP: He sues his own administration for a private payday.

https://prospect.org/2026/02/03/trump-demands-10-billion-taxpayers-money/

President Trump with Treasury Secretary (and acting IRS Director) Scott Bessent aboard Air Force One, October 27, 2025. Credit: Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo

Imagine a meeting of Democratic consultants, batting around their thoughts about what might be the most self-damaging action Donald Trump could conceivably take. One consultant—let’s call her Jane—suggests that Trump might order the government to simply give him some billions of the dollars that law-abiding Americans have paid in taxes to their government.

The other consultants respond skeptically. “He couldn’t be that stupid,” one says. To which Jane replies, “He could be that self-absorbed.” He could indeed. Last Thursday, Trump and his two elder sons sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion in damages for the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020, which showed that in two recent years, he had paid just $750 in federal taxes.

It was Charles Littlejohn, a contractor employed by the firm of Booz Allen to assist the IRS, who provided the returns to the Times, for which he was convicted and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence. Taxpayers whose returns are made public can sue the IRS, which billionaire financier Ken Griffin did when Littlejohn leaked his returns to ProPublica. The IRS argued that, since Littlejohn was not its employee, it bore no responsibility for his leaks, then issued an apology and settled the case with Griffin.

Were Trump a private citizen, his suit wouldn’t be blatantly outrageous, though the dollar amount would surely look ridiculous. And were Trump a president in the mold of every one of his presidential predecessors, who understood that they couldn’t turn the federal government into their private piggy bank, at least not in a way that would be visible to all, his idea to sue the government would doubtless be shot down by every one of his counselors.

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3 replies

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Highlight:

Trump Demands $10 Billion in Taxpayers' Money (Original Post) Celerity Feb 3 OP

He's a big slimy parasite, always been, always will be. Dave Bowman Feb 3 #1

We need to make a law against personal law suits. pwb Feb 3 #2

MaddowBlog-Trump shares his plan for the $10 billion he expects to receive from his IRS lawsuit LetMyPeopleVote Feb 5 #3

Dave Bowman

(6,959 posts)

1. He's a big slimy parasite, always been, always will be.

Reply to Celerity (Original post)

Tue Feb 3, 2026, 08:05 PM

Feb 3

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pwb

(12,570 posts)

2. We need to make a law against personal law suits.

Reply to Celerity (Original post)

Tue Feb 3, 2026, 08:14 PM

Feb 3

Or maybe a go fund me fight trump account. Make his money useless against people for a change.

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LetMyPeopleVote

(177,237 posts)

3. MaddowBlog-Trump shares his plan for the $10 billion he expects to receive from his IRS lawsuit

Reply to Celerity (Original post)

Thu Feb 5, 2026, 08:21 PM

Feb 5

The more the president tries to defend his desire for a taxpayer-financed payout, the worse his position appears.

Trump shares his plan for the billion he expects to receive from his IRS lawsuit - MS NOW

apple.news/ARl5TPJvuSMe...
— (@oc88.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T23:49:05.193Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-shares-his-plan-for-the-10-billion-he-expects-to-receive-from-his-irs-lawsuit

During Donald Trump’s first term, a former IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn gained access to the president’s tax returns and shared the documents that the Republican had been desperate to hide. Littlejohn was caught, charged, convicted and sent to prison.

More than five years later, Trump has decided that the criminal penalty wasn’t enough: He believes the disclosure of the truth entitles him to a $10 billion payout from the federal tax agency, which the president sued last week.

The payout, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent conceded to senators, would come from American taxpayers.....

Just as notably, the underlying lawsuit is still absurd, and vague assurances about where some or all of the money might go at some future date don’t turn a baseless case into a good one.

But there is another part of Trump’s pitch that stands out for me. From the transcript:

I have another lawsuit with the United States. I sued because they broke into Mar-a-Lago. … And I’ve won that case. I mean, I virtually, they broke, the FBI illegally, Biden and his group. It wasn’t Biden. He didn’t know what he was doing. It was a group of very smart radical left people. They’re very smart. They just, they’ve lost their way.

And they broke into Mar-a-Lago. They broke into my home. They went through my wife’s drawers. They went through, you know — it’s a double meaning. They went through Barron’s, my son’s, everything. They went through the whole house. Hundreds of people, they went in with guns. They went in guns, would’ve been a-blazing. I brought a lawsuit. Essentially, the lawsuit’s been won. I guess I won a lot of money.

Most of this is familiar nonsense (no one, for example, “broke into” his glorified country club, and there was no secret cabal orchestrating the law enforcement process), but one element to this deserves additional scrutiny: He said he’s “essentially” won a lawsuit that resulted in him getting “a lot of money.”.....

On the other side of Capitol Hill, two leading Democratic senators, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden and Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, launched a new investigation this week into Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.

“While the Internal Revenue Code permits a taxpayer to seek redress for unauthorized disclosures, Congress designed this provision to provide compensation for proven harm — not to confer $10 billion dollar windfalls to a President seeking to line his own pockets at taxpayer expense,” the Oregon and Massachusetts senators wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

They added, “The leaks occurred from May 2019 through September 2020, when President Trump was in office and his hand-picked nominees, Steven Mnuchin and Charles Rettig, controlled the Treasury and IRS respectively. Trump is in essence now suing the government for his own failures during his first term. This lawsuit is a shameless and transparent act of corruption that should make any American’s head spin. We fear that instead of fighting this frivolous attempt by President Trump to profit off the failures of his own administration, cabinet officials intend not only to capitulate to Trump but coordinate with him in this brazen theft from the American people.”

The concept that trump would have officials he appointed approve a settlement of this bogus claim is crazy.

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