The former IRS contractor who leaked a slew of confidential tax documents to media outlets in 2019 and 2020, including several which belonged to then-President Donald Trump, was sentenced Monday to five years in federal prison.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty to the leaks, which saw him provide Trump’s tax returns and financial data to The New York Times. He also gave thousands of other wealthy Americans’ information to nonprofit investigative outlet ProPublica.
The leaks led to news reports that revealed how Trump and others found ways to skirt paying federal taxes—or paid very little—despite being worth billions.
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While the leaks were revealing and went instantly viral, federal prosecutors weren’t so amused by the act—which Justice Department officials deemed to be “unprecedented.”
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, who handed down Littlejohn’s sentence, foreshadowed the punishment—the statutory maximum—in a plea hearing in October, telling Littlejohn that he’d face “serious consequences for this illegal act.”
“People taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable,” Reyes said.
Others who had their tax documents leaked were Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk.
Prosecutors said Littlejohn “weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law.” Littlejohn’s guilty plea means that it will remain unclear how he accessed the tax documents and what consulting firm he worked at when he got them.
Littlejohn’s lawyers say he leaked the documents “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.”
That argument didn’t dissuade Reyes from sentencing Littlejohn to the maximum sentence allowed, in addition to ordering him to pay a $5,000 fine. Reyes compared the leak to the actions of Jan. 6 defendants she’d recently sentenced.
“You can be an outstanding person and commit bad acts,” Reyes said Monday, according to NBC News. “What you did in targeting the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy.”
