https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-doj.html
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Officials at the department and the White House are in the middle of a messy and complicated debate over how to respond to President Trump’s lawsuit demanding $10 billion from the I.R.S.
March 31, 2026
The Justice Department is struggling to decide how to respond to President Trump’s lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion from the I.R.S., as the department’s lawyers try to resolve by a mid-April deadline the profound ethical questions the case raises, according to two people familiar with the dynamic.
In late January, Mr. Trump took the extraordinary step of suing a federal agency that he oversees, accusing the I.R.S. of not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2020. The suit immediately elicited questions about whether and how Trump administration officials would defend against a lawsuit filed by the head of the executive branch. The government has not yet responded to the case.
Inside the Justice Department and the White House, senior officials are in the middle of a messy and complicated debate over their next steps, according to the people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
While former Justice Department officials see clear flaws in the president’s case, some Trump administration officials worry that assigning a lawyer to contest it would pose an unworkable conflict, given that such a person ultimately works for the president, according to the two people. Defending the case could also contradict a White House executive order that binds all government lawyers to the president’s interpretation of the law.
Another option under consideration is to try to delay the case, either by requesting more time to respond to the suit or by asking the judge to put it on hold until after Mr. Trump leaves office in 2029. Mr. Trump’s lawyers served the government with the suit on Feb. 18, giving the Justice Department 60 days to respond.
The Justice Department could also ask the judge in the Southern District of Florida presiding over the case, Kathleen M. Williams, an Obama nominee, to take other action to resolve the conflict of interest faced by the government’s attorneys, the people said. The judge could appoint an independent counsel to defend the case instead of the Justice Department, for example.
Settling the case would involve some of the president’s top aides, including one of his own former defense lawyers, approving a potentially gigantic disbursement of taxpayer dollars to Mr. Trump and his family, a possibility that is likely to provoke political blowback.
Regardless, Trump administration officials expect that they will ultimately have to consult Mr. Trump himself on how the government should respond to his lawsuit, the people said.
Mr. Trump has said that he would donate any winnings from the suit to charity.
“Anything I win, I’m going to give 100 percent to charity,” he said in February.
The White House referred questions to the Justice Department, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump’s suit against the I.R.S., which the Justice Department represents in federal court, is not his only attempt to extract legal damages from the government he leads.
In private administrative claims, he has also asked for the Justice Department to pay him $230 million as compensation for the federal investigations into him. Mr. Trump’s I.R.S. suit seeks an order of magnitude more money than his other claims, and will also play out as part of a public lawsuit, creating more complexity for the Justice Department.
The president’s suit, which he filed alongside two of his sons and his family business, argues that the I.R.S. did not do enough to prevent Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor, from disseminating Mr. Trump’s tax returns to The Times. In 2020, citing Mr. Trump’s tax returns, The Times published a series of articles revealing that he had paid little or no income tax for years.
In early 2024, Mr. Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for disclosing tax information about Mr. Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans to The Times and ProPublica. In addition to imposing criminal penalties, federal law also allows people to sue the I.R.S. over the unauthorized disclosure of their tax information.
Those suits are supposed to be brought within two years of a taxpayer learning about the disclosure of their tax information. In his suit, Mr. Trump said that he did not learn that his tax information had come from the I.R.S. until Jan. 29, 2024, exactly two years before he filed his suit, when he received a formal notice from the I.R.S. about the disclosure.
But some former I.R.S. and Justice Department officials, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in Mr. Trump’s suit, said that Mr. Trump must have known about Mr. Littlejohn’s responsibility for the leak earlier. The brief notes that Alina Habba, identifying herself at the time as a lawyer for Mr. Trump, attended Mr. Littlejohn’s guilty plea in October 2023.
In a normal proceeding, the Justice Department would likely start by trying to throw out the case because it came too late, former department attorneys said. In other cases stemming from the leaks, government lawyers have also said the I.R.S. could not be blamed for Mr. Littlejohn’s actions, since he was a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton and not an I.R.S. employee.
Mr. Trump’s demand for at least $10 billion in damages for the leak struck several former tax lawyers at the Justice Department as outlandish.
“It’s outrageous that the head of the executive would shake down an agency like this,” said Charles Duffy, who once worked in the tax division of the department.
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