


House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday requesting further documents about Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who leaked President Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times in 2019 and ProPublica in 2020.
“Due to the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and accountability, the Committee has learned that the scope of Mr. Littlejohn’s leak was much broader than the Biden-Harris Administration had led the public to believe,” reads the letter.
During Littlejohn’s sentencing in 2023, DOJ prosecutors called the scale of his leaks “unparalleled in the IRS’s history,” yet he was sentenced to only five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty to a single felony charge. At the time, the DOJ claimed that Littlejohn had leaked the tax information of about 18,000 individuals and 73,000 businesses.
Some argued that he should have been charged with one individual count per taxpayer, or at least once for each of his two thefts. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., called the negligible sentence “a slap on the wrist.” When the Judiciary Committee asked the Biden-Harris DOJ for documents about the case, they refused to comply and defended Littlejohn’s sentence.
After Trump was re-elected, the IRS informed the Judiciary Committee that the scale of Littlejohn’s leaks had been even larger — more than 405,000 victims, 89% of them business entities, according to the letter.
In addition to Trump’s tax returns, Littlejohn leaked financial information for Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and other billionaires — all while evading IRS security measures designed to prevent employees from accessing sensitive data. ProPublica used this data to write a series of articles arguing in favor of taxing the rich.
According to the prosecution, Littlejohn sought his job as an IRS consultant with the intent of leaking Trump’s tax returns. He considered Trump to be a threat to democracy.
“While it is now clear that Mr. Littlejohn’s conduct violated the privacy of hundreds of thousands of American taxpayers, it remains unclear why the Biden-Harris Justice Department chose to allow him to plead guilty to only a single felony count,” reads Jordan’s the letter.
Littlejohn recently declined to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, appealing to his Fifth Amendment Right against self-incrimination. He is currently appealing his sentence.
To further the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, Jordan requested that all documents and communications relating to Littlejohn’s plea agreement and the DOJ’s investigation of his leaks be released before June 17.