WASHINGTON – A former Internal Revenue Service contractor was sentenced Monday to five years in prison and goes on trial for leaking the tax records of former President Donald Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans to media organizations. Officials called his actions a threat to democracy.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty in October to unauthorized disclosure of income tax return information.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, who handed down the sentence in federal court in Washington, linked Littlejohn’s actions to broader attacks on elected officials in the United States.
“Your actions targeting the sitting President of the United States are an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Reyes said during the sentencing hearing. “We can’t put our elected officials in open season.”
Federal prosecutors had sought five years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed under U.S. law, for Littlejohn’s breach of the security of sensitive personal information that was motivated by political objectives. Prosecutors said Littlejohn sought employment in 2017 at a consulting firm working with the IRS in hopes of accessing and disclosing records relating to then-President Trump.
Littlejohn apologized for his actions.
Mr Littlejohn told the court: “I acted based on a sincere, if misguided, belief that I was serving the public interest.”
Littlejohn’s lawyers said he was motivated by a “deep moral belief” that the public had a right to know the information he shared. Littlejohn’s attorneys did not ask for a specific sentence, but asked for punishment similar to previous government information leakers.
According to court documents, Littlejohn secretly downloaded years of President Trump’s tax records in 2018 and later shared them with New York Times reporters. In 2020, the newspaper published a series of articles revealing that Trump paid no income taxes in 10 of the 15 years before he was elected president.
When Trump ran for the White House in 2016, he became the first major U.S. presidential candidate in decades not to release his tax returns. After a legal battle, a U.S. House of Representatives committee released six years of his tax records in 2022.
Littlejohn then leaked tax information about “ultra-wealthy taxpayers” to investigative news organization ProPublica. He was motivated by concerns about economic inequality, and he wanted to promote tax reform in the United States, his lawyers said in court documents.
ProPublica published nearly 50 articles based on this information, revealing how wealthy Americans avoid income taxes.
The nearly 6,000 pages of records released by the House committee in 2022 included more than 2,700 pages of personal tax returns from Mr. Trump and first lady Melania Trump and more than 3,000 pages of business returns. They say President Trump’s income and tax liability fluctuated dramatically from 2015 to 2020, with President Trump and his wife claiming large deductions and losses and paying little or no income taxes in several of those years. clarified that it is not.
