Justice Department Charges Man Who Allegedly Stole Trump Tax Returns – The U.S. Justice Department has charged Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, with stealing former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and leaking them to the media.
Littlejohn, 38, of the District of Columbia, stands charged with “one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information” and faces “a maximum penalty of five years in prison,” The Justice Department said in a statement.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the IRS’s internal watchdog, has the case under investigation. Fox News reports that Littlejohn is set to plead guilty.
He worked for a consulting firm that did work for a contracting company that provided services to the U.S. government when these allegations took place.
The New York Times reported that paid $750 million in income for 2016 and 2017 and that he paid no taxes between 2000 and 2015. He also owed more than $300 million on loans due coming in 2024.
Littlejohn allegedly leaked Trump’s returns to media outlets such as The New York Times. Trump’s name does not appear in the charging press release.
The Times produced a September 2020 article titled “Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance,” as a result.
Thousands of Tax Documents Stolen
“Littlejohn also stole tax return information for thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals, and disclosed this tax return information to another news organization (News Organization 2),” the release said.
Pro Publica stated the it might have been a beneficiary of the information described in the release but also claimed that it did not know the identity of the source. The information matched that found in its series “The Secret IRS Files Trove of Never Before Seen Record of How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.”
“As we have said from the beginning, we do not know the identity of the source, so we have nothing further to say about the charges filed today,” Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief, said in the story.
The series included tax information on billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett among others. Littlejohn’s alleged theft included “thousands” of records.
A guilty plea is apparently in the works, Fox News Digital reported.
Democrats Wanted Trump’s Taxes For Political Reasons
Democrats worked for years to get access to Trump’s tax records looking for details they could use against him politically.
“Presidents dating back to Nixon have released their tax information. As Nixon himself explained: ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.’ Two pages from a twelve-year-old tax form simply do not shed much light on the president’s business dealings or potential conflicts of interest. As it stands, Americans have every reason to worry about profiteering in the White House. Unfortunately, having dribs and drabs of tax information leak slowly into the media encourages the kind of speculative and even conspiratorial thinking that undermines public debate,” Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Vanessa Williamson wrote in 2017 about Trump’s taxes.
IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel called the disclosure “unacceptable” and claimed the security had been increased.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
