Topline
A former IRS contractor pleaded guilty Thursday to leaking the tax information of former President Donald Trump and other wealthy Americans to news organizations and now faces up to five years in prison ahead of his sentencing in January.
The IRS contractor was charged in September with leaking tax information now confirmed to have … [+] belonged to Trump. (Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images)
Key Facts
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty to disclosing tax return records without authorization, admitting to prosecutors he leaked Trump’s records to the New York Times and the tax records of wealthy individuals to ProPublica—the authors of a 2021 exposé about tax-avoidance strategies used by billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Prosecutors did not explicitly identify Trump in statements about Littlejohn’s charges but did allege the information was given to news outlets that published “numerous articles describing the tax information they obtained from the defendant.”
Prosecutors said Littlejohn accessed Trump’s tax returns through an IRS database and saved the data to multiple storage devices, including an iPod, before providing it to one of the news outlets between around August 2019 and October 2019.
Littlejohn stole the tax return records for thousands of wealthy Americans about a year later, providing it to another news outlet and destroying evidence of his disclosures ahead of an investigation into his conduct.
Littlejohn will be sentenced next year on January 29 and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison, according to prosecutors.
Key Background
ProPublica told Forbes in September, following the initial charges against Littlejohn, that it didn’t know the identity of the source who provided information on the taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans. The outlet’s story looked into income and tax numbers belonging to billionaires like Musk, Bezos, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg. It used the tax records to reveal several years in which the wealthy individuals avoided paying federal income taxes. Although prosecutors did not name ProPublica or the New York Times in the indictment, the Times reported Wednesday that the unidentified outlets were ProPublica and itself, citing a person familiar with the situation. The Times’ story looking into Trump’s 2016 and 2017 tax information found the former president paid little to no federal income taxes, revealing business losses were used by Trump to absolve him from having to pay taxes.
Further Reading
Ex-IRS contractor pleads guilty in leak of tax return information of Trump, wealthy people (AP)
