WASHINGTON – A former US Internal Revenue Service contractor was sentenced to five years in prison on Monday for leaking the tax records of former President Donald Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans to media organizations, with a judge calling his actions a threat to democracy.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty in October to a charge of unauthorized disclosure of income tax return information.
US District Judge Ana Reyes, who handed down the sentence in federal court in Washington, linked Littlejohn’s actions to a broader attack on elected officials in the United States.
“What you are doing in targeting the sitting president of the United States is an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Reyes said during the sentencing hearing. “It can’t be open season on our elected officials.”
Federal prosecutors had sought a five-year sentence, the maximum allowed under US law, arguing that Littlejohn was motivated by a political agenda and compromised the security of sensitive personal information. Littlejohn, according to prosecutors, sought a position at a consulting firm working with the IRS in 2017 in hopes of accessing and disclosing records about Trump, who was president at the time.
Littlejohn apologized for his actions.
Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison on Monday. AFP via Getty Images
“I acted in the sincere, if misguided, belief that I was serving the public interest,” Littlejohn told the court.
Littlejohn’s lawyer said he was motivated by a “deep moral belief” that the public had a right to know the information he shared. Littlejohn’s legal team is not asking for a specific sentence, but for a sentence comparable to that of previous government whistleblowers.
Littlejohn secretly downloaded years of Trump’s tax records in 2018, then shared them with a reporter from the New York Times, according to court documents. The newspaper published a series of articles in 2020 revealing that Trump had not paid income taxes in 10 of the 15 years before he was elected president.
Trump became the first major US presidential candidate in decades not to release his tax returns when he ran for the White House in 2016. A US House of Representatives panel released six years of his tax records in 2022 after a court battle.
Littlejohn secretly downloaded years of Trump’s tax records in 2018, then shared them with a reporter from the New York Times, according to court documents. AP The leak revealed that Trump did not pay income taxes in 10 of the 15 years before he was elected president. DINNER ALLISON/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Littlejohn later leaked tax information about “very high net worth taxpayers” to investigative news outlet ProPublica. He is motivated by concerns about economic inequality and wants to push for reforms to the US tax system, his defense team wrote in court documents.
ProPublica published nearly 50 articles based on that information, revealing how the wealthy avoid income taxes in the United States.
The nearly 6,000 pages of records released by the House panel in 2022 include more than 2,700 pages of personal returns from Trump and his wife Melania Trump, as well as more than 3,000 pages of returns from his businesses. They show that Trump’s income and tax liability fluctuated dramatically from 2015 to 2020 and that he and his wife claimed large deductions and losses, and paid little or no income tax in those years.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
