Left: Elon Musk arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue). Center: Former President Donald Trump leaves his apartment building in New York, Monday, Jan. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File). Right: CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 19, 2017. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images).
The man who admitted to leaking tax information about former President Donald Trump — as well as some of the wealthiest people in the U.S. — has received the maximum prison sentence possible.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty in October to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information. Littlejohn was working at the Internal Revenue Service as a contractor in 2018 when he stole the protected information and shared it with news organizations. The New York Times later published a report that included details of two decades’ worth of Trump’s tax returns, and in 2021, a ProPublica story based on private tax information of billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett revealed that some of the world’s wealthiest people paid little to nothing in federal taxes.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes ordered Littlejohn to spend five years in federal prison — the maximum sentence available under federal law. The defendant must also pay a $5,000 fine and will spend three years on supervised release after his prison term.
Reyes, an appointee of President Joe Biden, told Littlejohn in unequivocal terms that he had undermined the very system he claimed to want to improve.
“Let me be absolutely clear: What you did, in targeting the sitting president of the United States, was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” she said, according to The Washington Post.
The judge said that public officials must be protected from becoming targets.
“He targeted the sitting president of the United States of America, and that is exceptional by any measure,” Reyes said, according to CBS News. “It cannot be open season on our elected officials.”
Speaking on his own behalf at the hearing, Littlejohn said his motivation was transparency, but he also knew the potential consequences.
“I made my decision with full knowledge that I would likely end up in a courtroom to answer for my serious crime,” he said, CBS reported. “I used my skills to systematically violate the privacy of thousands of people.”
Littlejohn had requested a prison term within the sentencing guidelines range, which the government’s sentencing memo said was eight to 14 months. Prosecutors said the guidelines range “does not capture the gravity” of Littlejohn’s crime and ignores aggravating factors.
“Throughout Defendant’s scheme, he undertook efforts to obstruct and impede the investigation that he anticipated would follow the publication of the tax data he had stolen,” the government’s sentencing memo says. Those efforts included deleting files, destroying virtual machines he used to steal the taxpayer returns and information, and canceling the domain of the private website he created to temporarily store the information.
“Defendant essentially chose to take the law into his own hands: his disclosures were in fact part of a lawless, vigilante effort to circumvent the democratic process,” the memo also says.
Littlejohn’s sentencing memo described the defendant as someone who saw himself as doing something good for his country.
“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,” Littlejohn’s memo says. “He did what he thought was right at the time, but now fully acknowledges that he was wrong. Mr. Littlejohn recognizes the grave impact of his actions not only on the victims whose tax data he leaked to the media, but also on the very system that he hoped to improve.”
Littlejohn’s sentencing memo included multiple letters of support from people pleading for mercy on his behalf.
“I teach my students that there is no such thing as a ‘good’ person or a ‘bad’ person,” said a letter written by someone described as a college friend who is now a professor of philosophy of law. “We are all just people who do things the law considers good or bad. But if anyone is a good person, Chaz is. I have never known him to make any big decisions with much regard for the negative consequences he might face. Those are the rare people I can say are categorically good people.”
Reyes, apparently, was unmoved at Monday’s hearing.
“You can be an outstanding person and commit bad acts,” the judge said at the hearing, according to NBC News.
Reyes said that Littlejohn would be allowed to voluntarily surrender for his sentence after April 30.
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