A consultant for the IRS has been charged with leaking the private tax information of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people to a prominent news outlet, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

The agency said Charles Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, D.C., stole the files while working as a government contractor and gave them to the news organization. The agency doesn’t name the outfit, though it appears to be referring to ProPublica.

It also says he leaked information about an unnamed public official to a second unnamed news organization.

He faces a maximum five years in prison, the Justice Department said.

The announcement comes more than two years after ProPublica said it had obtained a massive trove of information about the taxes of wealthy people, many of them well known, and began publishing a series of stories showing they paid little or nothing in taxes.

The leak astonished many IRS veterans because tax filings are subject to elaborate safeguards and leaks are rare.

Adding to the mystery was the silence of Biden administration officials, who had said virtually nothing publicly about the leak or how it had happened. Republicans accused Democrats of disclosing the information in hopes of fueling their push in Congress to raise taxes on the rich.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.