President Donald Trump said he would donate to charity any proceeds from a $10 billion lawsuit he recently filed against the IRS over what his lawyers say was an unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns.
“Any money that I win, I’ll give it to charity, 100 percent to charity, charities that will be approved by government or whatever,” Trump told NBC News reporter Tom Llamas in an interview published Wednesday, also saying, “You can’t leak documents.”
In late January, the president filed a lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, saying the agency failed in preventing a former IRS worker from allegedly disclosing his tax returns to media outlets in his first term.
When asked about the nature of the lawsuit in that the Treasury and IRS are poised to defend their interests against Trump’s challenge, the president noted that “there’s never been anything like it, in all fairness” before adding: “Don’t forget, I sued as a private citizen.”
Llamas, on multiple occasions, asked Trump whether he would tell administration officials to pay him.
“What I would do—tell them to pay me, but I’ll give 100 percent of the money to charity,“ Trump said at one point.
He said that he would potentially give money to the American Cancer Society, adding, “I don’t want any of the money.”
The lawsuit, filed late last month in a federal court in Florida, also includes the president’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as plaintiffs. It alleges that the leak of Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, who had worked for defense and national security tech company Booz Allen Hamilton, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to two news outlets in 2019 and 2020.
The suit alleged Littlejohn had “staff-like access” to tax returns and confidential tax return information and that he admitted to disclosing the president’s tax returns to ProPublica.
Trump, when asked recently by a reporter how he would manage being on both sides of the lawsuit, referred to a previous complaint he filed against the Department of Justice seeking roughly $230 million in damages over investigations into alleged Russia collusion claims and the 2022 classified documents case. He also made reference to sending the winnings to charity.
“I think what we’ll do is do something for charity,” Trump said on Jan. 31. “We could make it a substantial amount. Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”
