A former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contractor, Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty to stealing former United States President Donald Trump's tax information and other wealthy people in the country.
Prosecutors said that Littlejohn of Washington, DC, sent the Republican businessman's tax returns and other data to two media outlets, publishing numerous articles describing the information they obtained from the former IRS contractor.
Charles Littlejohn Pleads Guilty
The defendant pleaded guilty to one count of disclosing tax information, which he was charged with in late September. Littlejohn's crime affected so many individuals that it prompted prosecutors to discuss plans to create a public website to notify the victims of any developments in the case.
An attorney for Trump gave a victim impact statement during the plea hearing, calling the crime an "egregious breach." Alina Habba, the former president's attorney, said her client's returns were "kept in a vault at the IRS." She suggested that the leak may have cost Trump votes in the 2020 election, as per CNN.
Habba added that Trump opposed the idea of the plea deal and called for the maximum sentence of five years of imprisonment for the defendant. The federal judge overseeing the case, Ana Reyes, said that she agreed "completely that anyone taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable."
The 38-year-old admitted to obtaining thousands of individuals' tax returns by accessing the IRS database and leaking them to the New York Times and ProPublica starting in 2019. Using the information, the news organizations' articles detailed how Trump and other wealthy individuals in the US cut down their federal tax bills, sometimes down to zero.
The wealthy individuals affected by the leak include tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. They were the focus of published articles created by ProPublica, which analyzed how the richest Americans can avoid the federal government's tax bite.
The massive leak, which was unprecedented, renewed a debate in Congress regarding tax policy amid historic levels of income inequality. It also served as an X-ray into Trump's secretive finances after years in which he waged legal challenges to protect their confidentiality, according to the Washington Post.
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Stealing Donald Trump's Tax Information
Judge Reyes also rebuked Littlejohn several times from the bench and said that whatever ends the defendant had could not justify the means. She added that it did not matter who the victim of the crime was.
Her remarks came before mentioning Trump by name and telling Habba that the former president could come to deliver his statement at the former IRS contractor's sentencing, which was scheduled for Jan. 29.
Government officials argued that Littlejohn stole the trove of information from the IRS twice. However, they provided few specifics about how he could evade safeguards designed to protect taxpayer privacy twice, nor did the Department of Justice explain how he was caught.
A news release noted that the defendant used "broad search parameters designed to conceal the true purpose of his queries" to obtain the tax information of Trump and other wealthy individuals, said Politico.
