Former Internal Revenue Service contractor Charles Littlejohn has been sentenced to five years in prison for leaking former president Donald Trump’s tax returns.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, who was appointed by President Biden, issued Littlejohn’s sentence on Monday. He also must pay a $5,000 fine.
“You can be an outstanding person and commit bad acts,” Reyes said. “What you did in targeting the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy.”
Littlejohn pleaded guilty last year to stealing and leaking thousands of tax returns in 2019 and again in 2020, including former President Donald Trump’s tax documents. In a D.C. federal court in October, Littlejohn admitted that he used the IRS archive to obtain Trump’s and other conservative donors’ tax returns and then gave the documents to the New York Times and ProPublica.
The former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant acted out of “deep, moral belief,” his lawyers said this month, and thought that “the American public had a right to know the President’s tax information.” He also leaked the tax returns of Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos. Irrespective of Littlejohn’s intentions, Reyes said in October, “people taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable.”
The Department of Justice charged Littlejohn with one count of disclosing tax return information without authorization in September with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Because Littlejohn leaked the documents to “reputable news organizations—the New York Times and ProPublica—that he knew would handle the information responsibly,” his lawyers argued, the ex-contractor should receive an even lesser punishment than the anticipated 8-14 month sentence. Both outlets used the documents to publicize how wealthy Americans pay little in federal income taxes.
Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee asked the U.S. District Court for District of Columbia last week to hand Littlejohn the maximum sentence.
“Individuals who may be inclined to take the law into their own hands, as Mr. Littlejohn did, must know that they will be caught and that they will face severe consequences,” the committee said in a letter. “We worry that a sentence of only 8 to 14 months does not comport with the seriousness of the crimes committed and we are concerned that a sentence in that range will fail to have the deterrent effect needed to prevent such a theft and disclosure from happening again.”