The news organizations published blockbuster reports based on the trove of data, showing how Trump and the wealthiest Americans employed financial strategies to slash their federal tax bills, in some cases down to zero.
At a plea hearing Thursday, Littlejohn admitted he leaked Trump’s tax returns to the Times, which published articles based on the data in the months before the 2020 election. The returns of other wealthy individuals, including tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, became the basis of reports in ProPublica, analyzing how the richest Americans manage to evade the federal government’s tax bite. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The unprecedented leak of Americans’ confidential financial data renewed a debate in Congress about tax policy amid historic levels of income inequality, and served as an X-ray into Trump’s secretive finances after years in which he waged legal battles to protect their confidentiality.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes rebuked Littlejohn several times from the bench and said whatever ends he had could not justify his means. “I cannot overstate how troubled I am by what occurred,” Reyes said.
After an attorney for Trump, Alina Habba, delivered a statement in court calling for the maximum prison sentence of five years for Littlejohn, the judge said, “I agree completely that people taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable.”
“It doesn’t matter who the person is who was the victim of a crime,” Reyes said, before mentioning Trump by name and telling Habba that the former president could come deliver his own statement at Littlejohn’s sentencing, set for Jan. 29.
“Everyone can be well assured that there will be serious consequences for this illegal act,” Reyes said.
In a news release, the Justice Department said Littlejohn tried to hide his tracks and “saved the tax returns to multiple personal storage devices” before contacting one of the media outlets.
After sending a second batch of tax return information to another news organization, “Littlejohn then obstructed the forthcoming investigation into his conduct by deleting and destroying evidence of his disclosures,” the Justice Department said.
“By using his role as a government contractor to gain access to private tax information, steal that information, and disclose it publicly, Charles Littlejohn broke federal law and betrayed the public’s trust,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Littlejohn’s attorney, Lisa Manning, declined to comment after the hearing.
Speaking on behalf of Trump, Habba urged the Justice Department to investigate whether Littlejohn acted alone or in concert with others. She called the Trump-related leak an atrocity and “an egregious breach by an agent of the IRS … for political gain.” Littlejohn worked for a private company performing contract work for the IRS, according to federal prosecutors. Neither the Justice Department nor Littlejohn’s defense has identified the company.
The Times report, Habba noted, was published in September 2020, months before Trump lost reelection to Joe Biden. Habba said Trump “probably lost thousands of votes” because of the leak.
In its article on Trump, the Times said, “All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it.”
In a court filing, federal prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section said only a subset of the thousands of leaked tax returns — covering “at least 152 victims” — had been published by the media “as a result of the charged unauthorized disclosure.”
“ProPublica is not disclosing how it obtained the data, which was given to us in raw form, with no conditions or conclusions,” the news organization said in its report. In another report, the media outlet added: “We do not know the identity of our source. We did not solicit the information they sent us.”
A spokesperson for ProPublica declined to comment Thursday. The Times did not respond to a request for comment.
Reyes noted that the House Committee on Ways and Means had obtained five years of Trump’s tax returns, covering 2015 to 2020, after prevailing in a years-long legal battle that began under a different judge in the same D.C. courthouse.
“This is how we do things in this country. We have laws,” Reyes said. “And a court decides … what is permitted and what is not permitted.”
Illegal disclosures such as Littlejohn’s could imperil the government’s ability to collect taxes, if individuals can’t trust their financials will be kept confidential, the judge said.
Under federal law, the Justice Department usually would be required to notify each victim of a crime individually. But prosecutors said in a court filing that “the large number of potential crime victims in this case makes it impracticable to notify them on an individualized basis,” and the judge granted their request to publish mass notices instead on a Justice Department website.
Spencer S. Hsu and Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.
Read More:Charles Littlejohn pleads guilty to leaking Trump’s tax returns
2023-10-12 22:57:05
