For years, the media dined out on Donald Trump’s tax returns like it was the political equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. Now comes the awkward part for Washington: the federal government may have to pay up for the leak that made it all possible.
According to reports, the Department of Justice is quietly weighing whether to settle President Donald Trump’s massive lawsuit against the IRS — a case stemming from the unauthorized leak of his confidential tax records during his first term in office.
And yes, that means Trump’s own administration is now in the bizarre position of potentially cutting a deal with Trump himself. Only in Washington.
Trump filed the suit in January, demanding a staggering $10 billion in damages over the disclosure of his tax information to The New York Times, ProPublica and other media outlets that spent years obsessively combing through his finances while mostly shrugging at Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Clinton Foundation.
The infamous stories claimed Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017 — headlines the press treated like Watergate with a calculator.
But here’s the part conveniently forgotten during the media feeding frenzy: the leak itself was illegal. “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to The New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” a Trump spokesperson said when the lawsuit was filed.
That “rogue employee” turned out to be Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor employed through consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. Littlejohn pleaded guilty to unlawfully disclosing tax return information and was slapped with the maximum five-year prison sentence in 2024 — a punishment conservatives blasted as laughably light considering the political firestorm the leak unleashed.
Now, according to The New York Times, DOJ officials are engaged in “internal discussions” over whether to settle the case. The paper cited multiple sources familiar with the talks and noted that lawyers for Trump recently requested a 90-day extension in the case — classic legal smoke signaling something may be cooking behind the scenes.
One particularly eyebrow-raising possibility reportedly under review? The IRS potentially backing off audits involving Trump, his family members, or Trump-linked businesses as part of a broader agreement. After years of investigations, raids, subpoenas and audits targeting Trumpworld, the government may finally want this mess to quietly disappear.
The optics here are rich. The same Department of Justice now defending the IRS is currently led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — the former Trump defense lawyer who represented him between presidencies during the avalanche of criminal prosecutions brought by Democrats.
And Trump isn’t pretending otherwise. “We have a man who’s doing a great job, I’ll tell you,” Trump said Monday. “I knew it, because he kept me out of jail for years. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. He kept me out of jail.”
The IRS lawsuit is hardly Trump’s only justice tour through the federal bureaucracy. Last fall, reports surfaced that Trump was also seeking roughly $230 million from the DOJ over the FBI’s Russia investigation and the bureau’s 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid — two episodes Republicans still view as textbook examples of weaponized government dressed up as law enforcement.
In that case, Trump pursued compensation through administrative claims rather than a formal lawsuit, meaning officials inside his own administration could ultimately decide whether taxpayers cut him another check.
For the resistance crowd that spent years chanting “no one is above the law,” the latest development lands like a bad punchline: the government may wind up admitting the law was broken when Trump’s private tax records were dumped into the laps of his biggest media enemies.
Funny how “protecting democracy” always seems to involve leaking, spying, censoring or prosecuting the same guy.
