Salvador Rizzo reports:
A former IRS contractor who leaked a slew of confidential tax records filed by the wealthiest Americans, including those of President Donald Trump, was sentenced Monday to the maximum of five years in prison.
Charles Littlejohn pleaded guilty last year to one count of unauthorized disclosure of income tax returns. Littlejohn, 38, admitted that he leaked Trump’s confidential tax information to the New York Times in 2019 and then replicated his work the next year, filtering the tax returns and financial data of thousands of wealthy Americans to ProPublica.
The news organizations published reports showing how Trump and the richest Americans for years paid little or no federal taxes. U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes said Littlejohn had “pulled off the biggest heist in IRS history” and deserved the maximum sentence she could impose because he targeted a sitting president and thousands of others. Reyes compared Littlejohn to one of the rioters who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and said judges had to send a message that they will not tolerate “open season on our elected officials.”
“Let me be absolutely clear: What you did, in targeting the sitting president of the United States, was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” the judge told Littlejohn.
Read more at The Washington Post.