Man Who Leaked Trump’s and Bezos’ Tax Returns Sentenced to Five Years in Prison

WASHINGTON—A former IRS contractor was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for leaking the tax returns of then-President Donald Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans, receiving the maximum penalty he faced for a breach that drew outcry from lawmakers while shedding light on some strategies the ultrarich use to lessen their tax burdens.

Charles Littlejohn admitted last year to stealing confidential data from tax returns and providing them to two news organizations, the New York Times and ProPublica, while working as an Internal Revenue Service contractor.

Speaking to Littlejohn in court on Monday, Judge Ana Reyes said that while letters from his friends and family “uniformly speak” to a person of “immense intelligence,” deep caring and unwavering loyalty, “what you did” in leaking the confidential tax information of a sitting president “was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Reyes said.

Littlejohn apologized for providing tax information to the New York Times and ProPublica, which published their stories in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Wearing a suit and red tie, Littlejohn said he alone was responsible and acted with the “full knowledge” that he would likely end up in a courtroom.

“I also understand that my actions, despite being driven by a desire for transparency, were illegal and have caused significant harm,” he said.

Federal prosecutors had urged Reyes to hand down the maximum punishment, five years in prison, arguing that Littlejohn abused his position and “weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law.”

In remarks to Reyes, a federal prosecutor stressed the “enormous magnitude” of the leaks and said Littlejohn’s case involved “one of the most serious crimes in the IRS’s history.”

“This case is not about a momentary lapse of judgment,” said Jonathan Jacobson, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s public integrity section. “Instead, for years, this defendant was abusing his position of trust” to repeatedly and secretly steal confidential tax information.

Littlejohn’s plea deal drew partisan ire, with top Republican lawmakers criticizing it as overly lenient in allowing him to admit to only one charge of unlawful disclosure of tax information. At Littlejohn’s plea hearing in October, a lawyer for Trump urged Reyes to impose the maximum punishment. In a letter to Reyes last week, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee also recommended a five-years sentence, saying Littlejohn had taken “the law into his own hands and decided he knew what was best.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), whose tax information was included in the ProPublica leak, appeared at Monday’s sentencing hearing to deliver a victim-impact statement in which he called the plea agreement a “sweetheart deal.”

“I think it’s wrong. I hope you reject the plea deal, and if you don’t, that you give him the maximum sentence,” Scott said.

Reyes said she couldn’t reject the plea deal. But she questioned Jacobson, the prosecutor, on what other charges the Justice Department considered or that Littlejohn conceivably could have faced in connection with “biggest heist in the IRS’s history.”

The Times cast Littlejohn as a whistleblower and expressed concern over his prosecution. Spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said the paper’s reporting had provided “information that has long been seen as central to the knowledge that voters should have about the leader of our government and the candidates for that high office.”

Beginning in June 2021, the website ProPublica published a series of articles examining how American billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett paid little in income tax in relation to their immense wealth. ProPublica attributed its scoop to a “trove of Internal Revenue Service data” that included more than 15 years of tax returns from thousands of the wealthiest Americans. The website declined last week to comment on Littlejohn’s case and said it didn’t know the identity of its source.

In court papers, prosecutors said Littlejohn had worked intermittently for Booz Allen Hamilton from 2008 to 2013, then applied to return in 2017 with the “hope and expectation” of accessing and disclosing Trump’s tax information. The Justice Department referred to Trump in court filings as “Public Official A.”

In a statement, Booz Allen said it had supported the investigation into Littlejohn. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of this individual, who was active with the company years ago,” the company said.

Littlejohn’s lawyer, Lisa Manning, called the Justice Department’s recommendation “extreme” and unjustified. She underscored that Littlejohn had cooperated with the investigation and admitted to providing the press with tax records taken from the IRS.

“He committed this offense 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,” Manning wrote.

The punishment caps a yearslong mystery. Investigators had few leads to chase when the New York Times published details in September 2020 from two decades of Trump’s tax-return data—they didn’t even know if the returns came from a government leak. Almost three years later, as they pursued an inquiry into the separate breach of thousands of wealthy Americans’ tax data, they realized Littlejohn had been responsible for both. The three-year statute of limitations had already run out from when Littlejohn leaked the Trump material, but prosecutors were able to charge him with both disclosures by combining them into one count.

Several of Littlejohn’s family, friends, and former colleagues wrote to Reyes, describing how he was affected by the 2013 death of his half-sister at 19 from complications from leukemia. He had “put his entire life on hold” to take care of her, one wrote. Two weeks after her death, Littlejohn learned he was a match for an anonymous cancer patient and donated bone marrow and T-cells, saving the patient’s life, his lawyer wrote.

“Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct in 2019 and 2020 was the product not only of his misguided idealism but of life experience that led him to treat each day as if it were his last,” his lawyer wrote.

In 2018, Littlejohn, known to friends and family as Chaz, began to figure out how to obtain the records through searches that wouldn’t raise red flags. By the end of November that year, he had obtained 15 years of Trump’s tax-return data, his lawyer wrote.

In their court filing, prosecutors said Littlejohn learned that IRS protocols could detect and prevent large downloads or uploads from the agency’s systems and devices. So he “exploited a loophole in those controls” by uploading the information to a private website he controlled, they said.

He contacted the New York Times in 2019, and in 2020, the newspaper published a series on Trump’s taxes.

In the months before the Times published, Littlejohn began conducting searches to pull the tax information on the wealthiest taxpayers, using the same methods. In August 2020, a close family friend died in her 20s of cancer, Littlejohn’s lawyer said. He contacted ProPublica the following week.

But, in the months after ProPublica published its series revealing how the wealthy avoid income tax, he came to regret his conduct, his lawyer said.

“He originally acted out of a sense of moral duty, but soon came to understand that his conduct was morally wrong,” his lawyer wrote. “Instead of saving the tax system, his actions had undermined the IRS, breached the public trust, and violated the privacy of thousands of American taxpayers.”

Richard Rubin contributed to this article.

Write to C. Ryan Barber at [email protected] and Aruna Viswanatha at [email protected]