A former IRS contractor who made public tax records of prominent people, including former President Donald Trump, received a five-year prison sentence Monday.
Charles Littlejohn had pleaded guilty in October and was sentenced in Washington by U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, NBC News reported.
Addressing Littlejohn, Reyes said, “What you did in targeting the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy.”
Besides making the former president’s tax records public, he also released those of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
According to his lawyer, Littlejohn released the material “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.”
Addressing the court at the time of his sentencing, the 38-year-old man said he “acted out of a sincere but misguided belief that I was serving the public.”
In seeking the statutory five-year maximum sentence, prosecutors said Littlejohn “weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing he was above the law.”
Reyes compared his actions to those of the defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion she has sentenced.
Littlejohn engineered a plan to gain access to Trump’s tax returns by working as an IRS consultant employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, according to his lawyers.
Is this an adequate punishment?
To publicize tax returns and other financial information, he released the items to left-wing media outlets such as ProPublica and The New York Times.
His lawyer described Littlejohn’s actions as “inexcusable” and said his client “breached the trust placed in him by the United States government and violated the privacy of taxpayers.”
With NBC News citing Littlejohn as the source, the Times in 2020 ran a story saying Trump some years paid as little as $750 in income taxes.
The New York outlet also said the former president “paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”
From Littlejohn’s leak, ProPublica wrote a June 2021 story saying it had “obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”
“It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits,” the report said.
Littlejohn told the court the public needed to know how rich people avoided paying taxes so they could make their own judgments.
“I made my decision with the full knowledge that I would likely end up in a courtroom,” he said.
