Last week Donald Trump filed suit against the IRS, demanding $10 billion in compensation for the unauthorized disclosure of his taxes in September 2020. 

Oftentimes a news story will seem outrageous at first glance but, on closer inspection, will become less outrageous, or perhaps not outrageous at all. On such occasions, it’s the duty of a sober journal of opinion like The New Republic to set the record straight. 

This is not one such occasion. 

Rather, this is a story that, the more you dig into the details, the more outrageous it becomes. News coverage has actually failed to capture fully how very stupid this lawsuit is. I have now reviewed the relevant documents and can attest that, even for Trump, this lawsuit is an outlier. It’s batshit crazy.

And now, I’ll be happy to take your questions.

Has a president of the United States ever before sued the executive branch over which he presides?

He has not.

Wait, didn’t Trump previously sue the Justice Department over the FBI’s Russiagate investigation and its Mar-a-Lago search for documents that he refused to turn over to the National Archives?

Trump wasn’t a sitting president then, and that wasn’t a lawsuit but rather two administrative claims filed with the Justice Department. An administrative claim bypasses the courts to seek settlement under threat of filing a lawsuit. The Russiagate claim was filed in 2023, and the Mar-a-Lago claim was filed in 2024. You can read a copy of the latter here.

The administrative claims were unresolved after Trump began his second term, and as recently as October The New York Times reported that they remained so and that Trump was demanding the Justice Department pay him $230 million. In one respect, the administrative claims are even more kleptocratic than the IRS lawsuit: The decision about whether to settle, and for how much, resides entirely with Trump’s own Justice Department.

“It looks bad,” Trump admitted in October. “I’m suing [sic] myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit [sic] that was very strong, very powerful.” It’s possible that Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion to make his demand for a $230 million settlement seem reasonable.

OK, so Trump just became the first sitting president to sue the executive branch. But he’s suing over something that happened not recently, but years ago. Who was president when Trump’s taxes were disclosed?

Donald J. Trump! Trump’s taxes were downloaded and then made public during Trump’s first term. This is a president not only suing his own executive branch, but suing it over something that happened while he was running it. 

Do we know who stole the tax records?

Yes. It was an enterprising IRS contract employee named Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn (whose surname, yes, is also how the Merry Men addressed Robin........

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