The former Internal Revenue Service contractor who leaked former President Donald Trump's tax returns and the tax records of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to the press was sentenced Monday to five years in prison.
Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to the maximum sentence after pleading guilty in October.
Prosecutors in the case said he “abused his position by illegally disclosing the federal tax returns of thousands of Americans and other private financial data to multiple news organizations.”
[They reveal how many taxes Trump paid and how much money was returned to him by the IRS]
Prosecutors claimed Littlejohn “weaponized his access to taxpayer data to further his own personal and political agenda, believing he was above the law.”
Littlejohn was sentenced by District Judge Ana C. Reyes at a hearing in federal court in Washington.
He will also have to pay
a $5,000 fine
.
“You can be an exceptional person and commit bad acts,” Reyes said.
“What you did by attacking the then acting president of the United States was an attack against our constitutional democracy.”
Reyes compared Littlejohn's actions to other recent attacks and threats against elected officials, as well as those accused of the January 6 assault on the Capitol whom he has recently convicted.
He described his actions as a deliberate, complex, multi-year criminal plan, but said he believed he “sincerely felt a moral imperative” to act as he did.
Littlejohn's lawyer argued that he had committed the crime “out of a deep moral conviction that the American people had a right to know information and sharing it was the only way to achieve change” and that he believed he was right at the time.
Although the lawyer admitted that Littlejohn's conduct was “inexcusable” and “broke the trust placed in him by the United States Government by violating the privacy of thousands of taxpayers,” he said, he says that a “strong message of general deterrence” has already been sent to the public ”.
Littlejohn, 38, who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, briefly addressed the court before being sentenced, saying he “acted out of the sincere but mistaken belief that he was serving the public.”
[Trump's tax revelations threaten to damage his support among workers and bolster Biden]
Taxpayers deserved to know how easy it was for the rich to avoid paying into the system, Littlejohn added, saying he believes Americans make their best decisions when they are properly informed.
“I made my decision with full knowledge that I would probably end up in court,” he said.
Littlejohn also admitted to leaking the tax data of “more than 1,000” wealthy people.
“The scope and scale of the defendant's unlawful disclosures appear to be unprecedented in the history of the IRS,” said prosecutor Jonathan Jacobson.
“Simply never before has a case involved the disclosure of tax return information from 'more than a thousand' individuals and entities.”
In 2020, The New York Times published a report saying it had obtained more than two decades of Trump's tax information and that the president had only paid $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017. The following year, ProPublica released several tax reports of wealthy people.
With information from
NBC News