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Yesterday in the Southern District of Florida Donald J. Trump, in his personal capacity, filed a lawsuit for $10 billion in damages related to the leak of his tax returns. The defendants? The Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of the Treasury. I am not familiar enough with the relevant statutes to venture whether this claim is viable. Assuming it is, I am highly skeptical Trump and his co-plaintiffs could demonstrate $10 billion in actual damages (which is what the cited statutes allow them to recover plus costs and attorney fees). I also read both statutes as having a two year statute of limitations and the events giving rise to the liability occurred in 2019/2020 so it is not clear to me that the suit is viable on that basis.
The above may all be academic. My understanding of the relevant federal procedure is that judges are not going to raise issues like the statute of limitations or factual issues with alleged damages on their own initiative. Our system assumes the parties are adversarial, so the defendants would file a motion to dismiss citing the statute of limitations or contest any damage calculations they thought were incorrect. Of course, in this case, the plaintiff is also the boss of the defendant. With plenary power to fire them. Can Trump, as president, just order Scott Bessent (currently both the Secretary of the Treasury and Commissioner of the IRS) to settle the suit for the full amount? And fire him if he refuses? What is the precedent on presidents suing the government while they're president? Normally when one side of a lawsuit is not interested in pressing its case other entities that have a shared interest can intervene to do so, but it's not clear to me who is in that position here.
I guess (random layman thoughts) maybe there's an argument that federal courts don't have jurisdiction to hear this because the parties aren't actually in controversy as required by Article 3, since it's Trump suing himself? Just spitballing. Is there any legal mechanism, short of impeachment, to prevent Trump from gifting himself the full contents of the United States Treasury via lawsuit settlements?
This here is more American retardation on display for the rest of the world to see. Here in the UK we have the English rules on costs, meaning that the losing side in a dispute has to pay the reasonable legal costs of the winning side, where reasonable strongly depends on the size of the dispute. If you're going to file a $10bn claim a proportionate costs budget itself ends up in the nine figures range, meaning you need to put your money where your mouth is on the dispute being one where you're willing to take it to trial and win a substantial proportion of the amount claimed.
If you're just using lawfare to harass others based on flimsy claims worth nowhere near the claimed amount then you get hit with an early Part 36 offer forcing you to either publicly admit that your claim doesn't have anywhere near the amount of value you're saying and then withdraw the claim, or alternatively if you're stubborn I hope you like that public nine figure costs bill for the other side coming your way and costing you orders of magnitude more than the money you won at trial.
A proper costs regime keeps people honest, which is something sorely lacking in the American legal world right now.
That's completely wrong, isn't it? In the UK, the loser pays the costs of the winner. It's very very rare to pay the costs of the winner unless their behaviour is incredibly egregious.
Sry, my bad, I got it the wrong way around. Rest of my comment only makes sense if you take it to mean the right way around. Busy day...
Winning side paying the costs of the losing side would be a recipe for disaster as it would allow people to harass others via lawfare for free, as opposed to having to pay their own legal costs as they have to do right now in the US at least.
Of course, I was just surprised and wanted to check in case I was totally misinformed.
Incidentally, there are some cases where the loser doesn't have to pay costs, the most egregious of which is that if you are supported by public aid (mostly immigrants being supported by legal charities) you're theoretically poor and you don't have to pay even if a) you cause the other party to pay millions in damages or costs and b) your sponsors are rolling.
The UK's loser-pays-winner paradigm isn't perfect. My family were put off pursuing a perfectly-winnable claim because we had a 95% chance of winning but we would bankrupt ourselves trying to pay for the other side's top-tier legal team on the 5% chance we lost.
Losers pays without strict boundaries can of course be very bad too if the one paying the bill has deep pockets. It’s a recipe for the winning side to run of their lawyer tab for frivolous things. JPMorgan was the victim in a fraud of a start-up they bought but ended up having to pay the other sides legal bills as they had become an employee.
https://www.pymnts.com/legal/2025/jpmorgan-fights-paying-unconscionable-legal-fees-for-frank-founder/
It can be bad for 50-50 cases. Like think of Chevron and Exxon suing each other. The winning side could end up working out a deal where they inflate their bills in the win in exchange for lightly billing on other work etc.
The JPMorgan case is probably the extreme of extremes.
And of course long shot cases like the Tobacco lawsuits would have been tough to bring. Especially if you required deposits to bring a case if the one suing is judgement proof because they are a poor smoker dying.
That's why the recoverable costs are based on what's "reasonable" (decided by a judge at an early stage of the proceedings) rather than everything. What usually happens for serious cases is that you have a CCMC (Costs and Case Management Conference) before a High Court Master (like a judge but specializes in costs law) where both sides argue for how much each stage of the litigation is likely to cost them and what would be a reasonable spend and you get a chance to challenge what the other side says is reasonable. After that is done the total amount recoverable from the losing side is limited by this number for each of the stages (unless one party acts absolutely egregiously during the case in which case indemnity costs are available). Not to mention that for small claims under £100k in value we now have Fixed Recoverable Costs following the Jackson reforms meaning you can right now go online and find the table which would in 15 minutes allow you to calculate what your costs budget would be for e.g. if someone decided to sue you over £75k.
There's plenty of case law around these CMCs for what's been accepted in other similar cases so while you can run up the lawyer tab all you want the actual amount recovered if you win will still be sensible (usually this corresponds to around 70-80% of the costs incurred in a typical case, 100% recovery is actually quite rare, and of course if you start spending your money on frivolous legal things not covered by the budget there's no recovery for you even if you win, no Costs Master is going to allocate any spending for "gummy bears" and if he did it would be an easy appeal on the grounds of perversity). However this 70-80% recovery is still enough to discourage claim values which are out of all proportion to the total amount of harm the claimant has suffered because 70-80% of a nine figure sum is still massive.
How, pray tell, does Trump intend to demonstrate that the leak of his tax returns has caused him $10 billion worth of damage when his net worth is nowhere near that amount? He might have had a better loss of a chance claim had he lost the election but given that he won it that means in the UK I'd be very surprised if he was able to win more than a few hundred thousand pounds for this claim, even if everything is as he says it is. In the UK making such unfounded statements is itself seen as unreasonable behavior and no barrister would even be willing to make the argument that he suffered an eleven figure loss because it would go against their professional duties to the court.
The amount he collects is likely to be minimal. The statute that he is suing under allows for the greater of statutory damages of $1,000 per disclosure or actual damages. He would have to prove actual damages, which would be complicated, time consuming, and would require him to disclose the details of all of his business wheelings and dealings during the relevant time period, and then prove with a reasonable degree of certainty that he lost a particular sum. It can't be "my reputation was harmed and I recon I would have made billions if not for these disclosures"; it would have to be more like "I had a deal in place that was worth $x and I lost that deal after the inappropriate disclosure". This is made even more difficult by the fact that the tax returns were only disclosed to media outlets, who didn't actually publish the returns but merely reported on their contents. Additionally, Trump is the last person in the world to claim that anything in his tax returns would actually be embarrassing, so he's relying on a theory that he suffered reputational damage by the media outlets mischaracterizing the returns. It should also be noted that in cases where courts have awarded actual damages
So it's no surprise that he isn't going for actual damages here, which is odd if you read the complaint because most of it is a long whinge about how the New York Times unfairly portrayed his financial situation. He's going for statutory damages of "at least ten billion" on the theory that every time somebody read an article about the returns it counted as an unauthorized disclosure. This is almost certain to fail, as courts have consistently ruled that it's based on the number of times the discloser reveals the information and not on how many people see it; if the guy had put the returns on a slide projector in a room of 200 people, it would be one disclosure, not 200. So we have disclosures of tax returns to two outlets. It's unclear how many returns were actually disclosed. If we assume for the sake of argument that he disclosed 20 years of returns to both outlets, that would be $40,000 in statutory damages.
The complaint also asks for punitive damages, and the facts of the case seems to support them. However, Federal courts usually award these as a multiple of compensatory damages, and at a rate of 2/1 this would get an additional $80,000. So $120,000 total, which is money I'd like to have but a far cry from ten billion.
And this is where the UK would kill this litigation stone dead. If he's very unlikely to get more than $120k here in the UK what would happen very soon after the suit was filed is that the IRS would make a Part 36 Offer of say $200k + admitting to the leak in return for the suit being ended, with the consequence that if Trump didn't publicly accept this offer in 21 days (far cry between $200k and $10bn, the acceptance itself would lead to massive egg on his face) then if things went to trial and Trump won less than the $200k the IRS had offered earlier he would be liable for all the reasonable legal costs of the IRS from the date the offer expired.
It would put Trump in a proper bind: either take egg on his face from settling a $10bn suit (or so he says) for $200k or proceed to trial, win $120k and then have to shell out $15m for the IRS's legal costs in defending the claim, which leads to even more egg on his face. Final result: No $10bn suit ever gets launched because all pathways end with Trump getting egg on his face. Instead given that both parties are well aware that the true value of this suit is somewhere around $120k a private secret settlement is quickly achieved without the need to resort to public litigation.
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