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Posted by Joshua Scheer
President Donald Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, accusing federal agencies of failing to prevent the leak of his tax information to major news outlets between 2018 and 2020. The suit, filed in federal court in Florida, names Trump’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., along with the Trump Organization, as co-plaintiffs.
According to the complaint, the disclosure of Trump’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm,” public embarrassment, and political damage—claims that fold legal grievance into a broader narrative of institutional failure and political weaponization.
The lawsuit centers on the actions of Charles Edward Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security consulting giant deeply embedded in the federal surveillance and data-management ecosystem. Littlejohn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking tax data to The New York Times and ProPublica—an act prosecutors described as “unparalleled in the IRS’s history.”
There is no dispute that the leaks violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality statutes in federal law. What remains largely unexamined, however, is how a private contractor—working for a firm whose business model depends on government trust—was able to access, extract, and distribute the financial records of not only a sitting president, but also some of the wealthiest individuals in the country, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
This is not to say the public should be kept in the dark about how powerful figures spend their money. In Elon Musk’s case, for example, it was already public knowledge that he spent roughly $300 million during the 2024 election cycle. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans are getting even richer, according to Inequality.org In 2025, the top five billionaires all saw massive gains: Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX surged to $726 billion, up from $421 billion; Larry Page of Google jumped to $257 billion, from $156 billion; Larry Ellison of Oracle rose to $245 billion, up from $209 billion; Jeff Bezos of Amazon reached $242 billion, up from $233.5 billion; and Sergey Brin of Google climbed to $237 billion, from $148.9 billion. The three wealthiest dynastic families—Waltons ($483 billion), Mars ($120 billion), and Kochs ($154.8 billion)—hold a combined $757 billion, up from $657.8 billion at the end of 2024, a 16 percent gain overall. These figures underscore the widening gulf between concentrated wealth and the rest of society, a disparity that grows as the surveillance and privatized power state expands around us.
Back to Trump’s lawsuit which argues that the disclosures negatively affected his public standing and support among voters during the 2020 election. Whether that claim holds up in court is an open question. But the case raises a deeper issue that transcends Trump himself: the outsourcing of sensitive state power to private defense contractors operating with minimal transparency and weak oversight.
Booz Allen Hamilton is not a marginal player. It is a cornerstone of the national security-industrial complex, entrusted with massive troves of government data across agencies. That the Treasury Department only terminated its contracts with the firm after the exposure and prosecution of Littlejohn underscores how accountability in Washington often arrives late—if at all.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged as much when announcing the contract cuts, stating that Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect confidential taxpayer information. That admission alone raises questions about how many other vulnerabilities remain undiscovered.
“President Trump has entrusted his cabinet to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and canceling these contracts is an essential step to increasing Americans’ trust in government,” Bessent said in the statement. “Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.”
Trust in government is a strange thing to invoke right now. Time and again, we have watched the federal government fail the public—from ICE to Israel policy to countless other crises unfolding in plain sight.
We have also written extensively about the danger of government contracting relationships with private companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Palantir. These firms present themselves as offering safeguards, rights protections, and a legal framework. But this is what happens when you go up against them.
You can see this pattern clearly in Tracking, Targeting, and Terrorizing: ICE’s Surveillance State, or by listening to our latest podcast examining the expanding role of AI and the surveillance apparatus that comes with it. With guest Peter Byrne saying that “Alex Karp and Peter Thiel claim to be intellectuals,” Byrne says, “but they’re just corrupt billionaires channeling recycled xenophobia about China.” He notes that Palantir’s entire business model depends on government contracts and the maintenance of a permanent security state.
The media organizations that published Trump’s tax information framed their reporting as a public-interest exposé, highlighting the gap between elite wealth and tax responsibility. Yet the selective outrage—focused on the subject of the leaks rather than the systemic breach—has obscured a more troubling reality: a government infrastructure so porous that a single contractor could expose thousands of Americans’ most sensitive financial data.
Trump’s lawsuit may or may not succeed. But it forces a reckoning with an uncomfortable truth. In a system where data is power, and power is increasingly privatized, the real danger is not just who gets exposed—but who gets access in the first place.
I recently read an article about hacking and Charles Littlejohn while he was seeking work as a contractor, reported by the cybersecurity news site Zero Day.
“In court documents, prosecutors allege that Littlejohn took the IRS contracting job with the explicit intention of leaking tax records to the media. The case echoes that of Edward Snowden, who told the South China Morning Post in 2013—after revealing the NSA’s mass surveillance programs—that he deliberately sought a contracting position with Booz Allen Hamilton in order to gain access to classified information and disclose it to journalists.”
Comparing the two cases as equivalent is problematic at best. What Edward Snowden did was in the public interest. He exposed the role of government across multiple surveillance apparatuses—programs that should have been disclosed to the public long before he acted. What bears repeating in the Snowden case is not just what he revealed, but how many people inside the system already knew what was happening and chose to do nothing to alert the public.
I appreciate that Charles Littlejohn may have believed he was acting in the public interest by seeking access to Donald Trump’s tax documents, particularly given that presidents have historically disclosed their returns. But Littlejohn went far beyond that. He accessed and exposed the tax records of more than half a million people—an action that crossed a clear ethical and legal line.
As the federal government grows increasingly authoritarian in its approach, both the contractors and the government agencies they serve must be scrutinized. The problem is not confined to individuals; it is systemic, embedded in the expanding public–private surveillance architecture.
It has been more than a decade since Snowden’s revelations. Yet, as historian Jeremy Varon of the New School for Social Research told the Guardian , the consequences were limited: “There were modest tweaks to what the NSA could or couldn’t do—what it had to disclose, protocols for FISA warrants, and so on. A conversation was opened, but it did not result in a significant clawing back of the powers of the American government.” Varon adds that most Americans likely lost track of the specifics long ago, and that only a small fraction could still explain the substance of Snowden’s disclosures.
As our publisher has written, the internet has largely been reduced to a tool that makes us better consumers—better at shopping—rather than better citizens. Most people alive today were born into the post-9/11 surveillance state and the so-called war on terror. That reality has been normalized.
Yet normalization does not make it irrelevant. As long as this apparatus exists, we must continue to confront and understand the relationship between government power, private contractors, and our personal information—because that relationship defines the limits of whatever freedom remains.
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