Ex-IRS contractor sentenced to five years for leaking Trump, Musk tax returns
A former IRS contractor who leaked former President Donald Trump’s tax records to the New York Times was sentenced to five years behind bars Monday.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, who was also behind the leaks of tax records of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to ProPublica, pleaded guilty in October to a single count of disclosing tax return information without authorization.
Littlejohn will also face 36 months of supervised release and must cough up $5,000 in fines.
The sentence is the maximum that Littlejohn could have received on the charge and was what had been asked for by prosecutors. Littlejohn reportedly told the Washington DC courtroom that he “acted out of a sincere but misguided belief that I was serving the public.”
“I made my decision with the full knowledge that I would likely end up in a courtroom,” he confessed.
Littlejohn went on to claim that he wanted to inform the public how effortlessly the wealthy can skirt taxes.
US District Judge Ana Reyes was unimpressed, describing Littlejohn’s thievery as “an intolerable attack on our constitutional democracy.”
“I believe you sincerely felt a moral imperative,” the judge added, per Bloomberg. “I have thought deeply about your motivations and I also want to deter others who might have felt a moral obligation to break the law.”
Littlejohn forked over a trove of tax material on then-President Trump to the Times in August of 2019, court records show.
The paper began publishing stories based on that leak in September 2020, including one revealing the now-77-year-old had paid a paltry $750 in income taxes in both 2016 and 2017 –and nothing at all in 10 of the prior 15 years.
Trump had long withstood public pressure to divulge his tax records to the general public, fueling suspicion that he was hiding either illegal activity, conflicts of interest, or the true extent of his wealth (or lack thereof).
“The press tells us, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’ It also dies in lawlessness,” the judge said Monday, referencing the Washington Post’s slogan adopted in February 2017.
“There are numerous lawful means to bring things to light,” Reyes added. “Trump was under no obligation to expose his returns. People could vote for someone else. They could run against him.”
Littlejohn also took data from the nation’s wealthiest 500 people in the summer of 2020 and gave it to Propublica, according to prosecutors, who alleged the defendant sought out his contractor gig specifically to disclose tax data to the public.
Littlejohn worked for government contractor Booz Allen between 2008 and 2013. He came back to the firm in 2017 as a consultant.
“[Littlejohn] weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal political agenda, believing that he was above the law,” prosecutors argued.
In a bid to skirt detection, the feds claimed, Littlejohn searched IRS databases with broad parameters “designed to conceal the true purpose of his queries” rather than using generic phrases.
Justice Department officials described the IRS leak as unprecedented in the nation’s history.
