The IRS contractor who stole and leaked former President Donald Trump’s tax records has been sentenced to five years in prison.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty in October last year to one count of unauthorized disclosures of income tax returns after leaking Mr Trump’s and thousands of other’s tax records.
His plea agreement states that he stole Mr Trump’s tax returns as well as the tax information of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people”. At the time, he was working for a consulting firm with IRS contracts.
Mr Littlejohn shared the tax information with two news outlets and subsequently deleted the documents from his laptop, which had been issued by the IRS, before handing it back. He also removed the places where he had previously stored the information to remove any traces, CNN noted.
“What you did in attacking the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Judge Ana Reyes told Mr Littlejohn. “We’re talking about someone who … pulled off the biggest heist in IRS history.”
She added that his actions constituted a “threat” to US democracy which “engenders the same fear that January 6 does,” in reference to the Capitol riot in early 2021.
Prosecutors argued that Mr Littlejohn took great effort to attempt to get ahold of the records without detection, including by downloading information onto an iPad and later uploading it to a private site that he subsequently removed.
Judge Reyes criticised the Department of Justice for only bringing one count against Mr Littlejohn.
“The fact that he did what he did and he’s facing one felony count, I have no words for,” she said, according to CNN.
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