Ex-IRS contractor who leaked tax returns of Trump and richest Americans sentenced to 5 years in prison

WASHINGTON (CN) — The man responsible for leaking former President Donald Trump’s tax records to the New York Times and ProPublica was sentenced to 60 months in prison on Monday. 

Charles Littlejohn, 38, worked as a consultant with the IRS, where he leaked thousands of tax returns from the nation’s wealthiest people, including billionaire Elon Musk, Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott and about 7,600 others, as part of the “greatest heist in IRS history.”

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes highlighted the unprecedented nature of Littlejohn’s case as she passed down the five-year sentence in Washington federal court. 

“What you did, in targeting the sitting president of the United States, was an attack on our democracy,” the Joe Biden appointee said.

She drew a comparison between Littlejohn and defendants charged with attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, noting that both represent an apparent trend in society where people feel the need to break the law to “further their political goals.”

In a brief statement before the court, Littlejohn apologized for his actions, specifically addressing Scott and the thousands affected by the leaks, and briefly explained his reasoning.

“We as a country make the best decision when we are all properly informed,” he said, adding that he knew his actions would result in serious consequences. 

He then quoted Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and philosopher, saying: “Never regard as a benefit to yourself anything which will force you at some point to break your faith, to leave your integrity behind … to covet anything needing the secrecy of walls and drapes.” 

In the Justice Department’s sentencing memorandum, prosecutors described Littlejohn as intentionally applying to work at the IRS in 2017 to gain access to the then-president's tax returns, because he viewed Trump as “dangerous and a threat to democracy,” and release them to the public. 

Littlejohn created a plan to secretly download Trump’s tax returns, extract the data from the IRS database, upload them to a private website, download them to his personal computer and copy them onto an iPod he had configured into a personal hard drive. 

According to the Justice Department, Littlejohn contacted the New York Times in May 2019, then began disclosing Trump’s tax returns between August and October 2019. The news organization published its first article on the disclosure on Sept. 27, 2020. 

Both the New York Times and the ProPublica articles showed how Trump and the richest Americans paid little to no federal taxes for years. 

Littlejohn then leaked the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals dating back over 15 years to ProPublica in September 2020, mailing the organization a password-protected device containing the records. ProPublica began publishing a nearly 50-article series on the records in June 2021. 

Scott made an appearance at the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, D.C., to make a victim impact statement about the harm he and his family had suffered because of Littlejohn’s leak. 

He decried the plea agreement Littlejohn took in October, which allowed him to plead guilty to a single felony count for the unauthorized disclosure of tax return information. 

Scott called the agreement “the plea deal of a century” and urged Reyes to hand down the maximum possible sentence. 

Lisa Manning, Littlejohn’s defense attorney from the firm Schertler Onorato, argued that the maximum sentence of five years the Justice Department requested was excessive and wrongly discredited her client’s cooperation with the government. 

She asked Reyes to follow the sentencing guidelines for the single felony count he had pleaded to, between eight and 14 months. 

“He is not seeking leniency, he is seeking fairness,” Manning explained. 

Reyes, while sympathetic to Littlejohn’s belief that the public had a right to see a presidential candidate’s financial information before an election, noted that he had multiple legal avenues to call for such transparency without breaking the law.

Additionally, she said the fact that he specifically targeted a sitting president made his actions even more egregious and warranted a stricter sentence to prevent others from attempting similar conduct against laws they deem unjust. 

"What I just cannot get over … It cannot be open season on our elected officials, it just can’t be,” Reyes said. “Judges cannot just sit by and must do everything in their power to make clear it is not open season on our elected officials.”

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