Federal prosecutors have charged an Internal Revenue Service contractor with illegally leaking some tax records belonging to former President Donald Trump along with several other wealthy Americans to media outlets, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The charges appear to solve “a two-year puzzle over a security breach that prompted outrage from lawmakers and administration officials,” the WSJ report noted further.
The outlet noted further:
Charles Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, D.C., was charged Friday with one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information, and he faces up to five years in prison, according to a Justice Department news release.
Court records don’t name the taxpayers, the news organizations or the company that Littlejohn worked for, but the descriptions match two of the largest and most consequential disclosures of private tax information.
The chronology presented in the case aligns with the release of tax records belonging to affluent Americans by ProPublica in June 2021, as well as the disclosure of information from Donald Trump’s tax records for the years 2016 and 2017 by The New York Times in September 2020.
The charge represents the first indication of progress in a discreet two-year-long investigation and notably connects these two prior disclosures for the first time, the WSJ added.
“The charge was filed in a document known as an information, a type of document that prosecutors usually use if a defendant is expected to plead guilty to the charges. Littlejohn and his lawyer, Lisa Manning, declined to comment,” the paper said.
The WSJ noted that, generally speaking, IRS workers and contractors take tax privacy very seriously. They also know that their computer activities can be tracked. As such, the breadth and scope of the leaked disclosures were a shock to both top IRS officials as well as lawmakers. The length of the investigation also raised questions as to whether the agency’s computer-tracking software had glitches or gaps, the WSJ report said.
“While many questions remain, at the very least, IRS guardrails failed to prevent this brazen breach of taxpayer rights,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R – Idaho), the leading Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction on tax matters.
The WSJ added: “Court records don’t indicate how investigators found Littlejohn. The court filing mentions activities in northern West Virginia; the IRS has a major data center in Martinsburg that helps manage the Individual Master File, the main repository of personal tax information.
“ProPublica had said repeatedly that it didn’t know the identity of its source. Although the volume and nature of the records suggested it had come from inside the IRS, the government hadn’t said so until Friday. According to court records, Littlejohn worked for an IRS contractor from 2017 to 2021 and is alleged to have stolen the tax records from 2018 to 2020,” the outlet reported further.
This isn’t the first time Trump’s taxes have been an issue.
In November 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court denied former President Donald Trump’s emergency application requesting that it block a Democratic-led House committee from obtaining his tax returns.
“The denial allows Trump’s tax returns to be released to the House Ways and Means Committee, which has been attempting for years to obtain them from the Internal Revenue Service as part of its investigation into the service’s presidential audit program. Tuesday’s order, which was unsigned and included no dissent, vacates a temporary hold Chief Justice John Roberts placed on the documents earlier this month,” Axios reported.
“Trump, who has been fighting for years to block the release of his tax returns, requested the high court weigh in after a federal appeals court also declined one of his requests to block the release of the documents. Lawyers for Trump have argued that the committee does not have a legitimate legislative purpose for the documents and seeks only to publish them,” the outlet added.
“The Department of Justice under the Biden administration argued in a 2021 opinion that the committee’s request was legitimate and the Trump-era Treasury Department had no valid reason to refuse it,” Axios said.
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