Andrew Duehren

And in the fall of 2023, somebody was eventually caught, a man named Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS kid, then a contractor for the IRS.

And he pled guilty to having provided this information about the

Trump and then all these other wealthy individuals to The Times and ProPublica.

And then he was sentenced to prison in the beginning of 2024.

Yes, it is a crime, and it's also something that people can sue the IRS for.

So there is a civil lawsuit process that exists for people who think that their tax information has been improperly released by the IRS.

They can sue the IRS and potentially get damages for that.

And so in January, President Trump, two of his sons in the family business, demanded at least $10 billion from the IRS for the leak of this information, basically arguing that the IRS should have stopped

Charles Littlejohn from being able to do this.

Yes.

I mean, this was and is an extremely unusual situation, if not unprecedented entirely.

I mean, not only does the president control the leader of the Internal Revenue Service, the agency that he is suing, and the Treasury Department, which was also named in the suit.

You know, he chooses many of the people who lead those agencies and is involved in their decision making.

Right.

He has also played an enormous role in reshaping the Justice Department and kind of molding it in his image in a variety of ways.

And the Justice Department is supposed to be the IRS's lawyer in this case.

But, you know, there have been all sorts of things that the Justice Department has done in Trump's second term that are far beyond what a historically independent Justice Department would do.

Right, he's

Exactly.

And the idea that this Justice Department, which is now led by Todd Blanch, the acting attorney general, who was also President Trump's personal lawyer before he returned to the White House, would be making decisions about how to defend a lawsuit that