You have to hand it to Charles Littlejohn: There aren’t many defendants whose lawyers will say he had a “deep, moral belief” he had a right to commit a crime.
No, he didn’t attack his daughter’s rapist or steal from a local drug lord. He didn’t chain himself to the doors of an abortion clinic or expose illegal behavior by illegal methods. In fact, he exposed private information regarding perfectly legal behavior — namely, the tax returns of Donald Trump and other high net-worth individuals.
According to Bloomberg, 38-year-old Littlejohn — who will be sentenced on Jan. 29 and faces up to five years in prison — felt that deep, moral belief because Trump refused to release his tax returns like prior presidential candidates did. So, he got himself rehired as an Internal Revenue Service consultant for prominent firm Booz Allen Hamilton with the vow to “try to access the President’s tax returns if given the opportunity,” his lawyers said.
He was successful, stealing not only 15 years of Trump’s tax returns and sharing them with The New York Times, but stealing “data on the top 500 taxpayers by income for the previous 15 years, later leaking it to ProPublica,” Bloomberg reported.
His lawyers told the court that events “made him feel he did not have any other choice but to act;” this included the appointment of Charles Rettig as commissioner of the IRS, who backed Trump’s decision to withhold his tax returns.
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The returns — long believed in liberal circles to potentially contain a smoking gun — scarcely made a blip. As The New York Times reported in its writeup of the data it obtained from Littlejohn, the returns “portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.”
In other words, he paid exactly as much tax money as he was legally required to and nothing more, which confirms that … he’s not a sucker. Wow. Further bulletins as events warrant.
In court filings Tuesday, prosecutors painted a different picture of Littlejohn, saying in court filings that he “weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
He developed what they called a “sophisticated, detailed plan to secretly download” Trump’s tax returns, partially because he believed the president was a threat to democracy, and got around controls that prevented him from extracting the data without being detected by “exploit[ing] a loophole in those controls” and uploading the information to his own private website.
Is 5 years enough time in prison for a crime such as this?
Roughly six months later, he contacted the Times with an offer to provide the tax returns, and the rest was history. Not much history, but history nonetheless.
But, in a Wednesday memo, Littlejohn’s attorneys portrayed him as a sincere but misguided patriot.
“He committed this offense out of a deep, moral belief that the American people had a right to know the information and sharing it was the only way to effect change,” Littlejohn’s lawyers wrote.
However, he “recognizes the grave impact of his actions not only on the victims whose tax data he leaked to the media, but also on the very system that he hoped to improve.”
Do try not to laugh at that last part. What part of the system, pray tell, was Littlejohn hoping to improve by leaking sensitive data? Should we just throw everyone’s tax returns online and let America decide who’s paying their fair share? We should all be able to judge people by their salaries, net worth, deductions, charitable contributions and/or Social Security Numbers. (In my experience, everyone whose nine-digit code begins with a two is a troublemaker — and it’s high time we had access to the data to prove it.)
In addition to his delusions of grandeur and moral superiority, Littlejohn was “increasingly focused on the systemic inequality” of wealth in the United States, his lawyers said, adding that a journalistic piece about the tax habits of rich folk “might be the one way to cause meaningful change to reform the tax system.”
Or it might be one way to get five years in jail, one or the other. At some point, his lawyers claim, Littlejohn “began to realize the gravity of what he had done.
“He originally acted out of a sense of moral duty, but soon came to understand that his conduct was morally wrong. Instead of saving the tax system, his actions had undermined the IRS, breached the public trust, and violated the privacy of thousands of American taxpayers,” the filing read.
You don’t say. Amazingly, Littlejohn was only charged with one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information late last year, according to Fox News, resulting in an angry rebuke from House Republicans, who noted he made “two distinct disclosures to two separate news organizations impacting potentially thousands of taxpayers.”
And, while his lawyers are asking for less than the five years that he faces, prosecutors want the max, calling the breach “enormous” and “unprecedented in the IRS’s history.”
“He executed his disclosure scheme over the course of multiple years, plotting and calculating carefully at each step to minimize the risk of detection and maximize the impact of his disclosures,” prosecutors wrote.
“He reorganized his entire life around this crime,” they continued, “with the goal of getting access” to Trump’s tax returns.
Now, to be fair to Mr. Littlejohn, his reorganization of his life around this goal produced a grand total of … nothing. No proof of criminality, no change in the system, nothing but undermining trust in an organization — the IRS — that I previously imagined could only undermine trust in itself by changing its initials to “KGB.”
And for what? This is hardly an Edward Snowden case, where a contractor realized the enormity of the duplicitous activity his government was involved in and blew the whistle. Littlejohn got a job to blow the whistle on illegal activity, found none, blew it anyway, then kept blowing the whistle on perfectly legal tax filings until he got caught. And now he’s very, very sorry. Because of course he is.
It’s bad enough that our byzantine tax system has been weaponized by leftists in an official capacity. (See: Lerner, Lois.) Now, we have lone-wolf opportunists doing the work for them, as well. Five years in the slammer is a kindness for a data breach of this magnitude, but it’s better than nothing — and one hopes Littlejohn ends up being sentenced to and serving every day of it.
