IRS CONTRACTOR CHARLES LITTLEJOHN LEAKED DONALD TRUMP’S TAX RETURNS. BUT WE’RE JUST NOW LEARNING HOW MUCH DAMAGE HE REALLY DID. For much of President Donald Trump‘s first term in office, the coalition of Democrats, activists, and media figures known collectively as the Resistance believed that obtaining Trump’s tax returns would be the key to bringing down the president. Finally, on Sept. 27, 2020, at the height of Trump’s reelection campaign, the New York Times reported that it had “obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office.” The paper published several long articles based on the information.
Voila! The Holy Grail of the Resistance! The problem was the stories came and went and did not become the huge, earthshaking scandal the anti-Trumpers had hoped. The long-awaited bombshells weren’t really bombshells, and the political world moved on.
The New York Times did not reveal, of course, how it had obtained the information. That did not happen until Sept. 29, 2023, when the Justice Department charged a man named Charles Edward Littlejohn with unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. Littlejohn was not an employee of the IRS. He worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which worked under contract for the IRS.
According to the Justice Department, between 2008 and 2013, Littlejohn worked “intermittently” for Booz Allen Hamilton. He then left, but in 2017, he sought to return to the company, this time with “the intention of accessing and disclosing tax returns.” The returns he planned to disclose were Trump’s. The Justice Department said Littlejohn viewed the president as “dangerous and a threat to democracy.”
Littlejohn got the job, which gave him access to “vast amounts of unmasked taxpayer data, including tax returns and return information,” according to the Justice Department. That included Trump’s tax returns and those of his many companies. Littlejohn came up with a “sophisticated, detailed” scheme to conceal what he was doing. The work took months.
In May 2019, according to the Justice Department, Littlejohn got in touch with the New York Times. Between August and October 2019, with the election year approaching, he gave the paper Trump’s information. Littlejohn then went back to the well, got more Trump information, and gave that to the New York Times, too. About five weeks before Election Day, New York Times reporters published their first story based on the stolen information Littlejohn had given them.
Littlejohn was not finished, though. He broadened his sights to target billionaires and millionaires around the country, as well as the billionaire in the White House. “In or about July and August 2020,” the Justice Department said, Littlejohn “accessed unmasked IRS data associated with thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, including returns and return information dating back over 15 years.”
Littlejohn gave that trove to the left-wing media organization ProPublica. And these were not just 1040 forms. From the Justice Department: “Defendant did not merely disclose tax returns. He disclosed information that included income and taxes as well as investments, stock trades, gambling winnings, audit determinations, and many other types of financial material. One of defendant’s purposes in leaking the tax returns and return information to [ProPublica] was to catch the attention of the public with more salacious details than mere tax returns might provide.”
On June 8, 2021, ProPublica published “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.” ProPublica reported that it had “obtained a vast cache of IRS information” covering billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, George Soros, Kenneth Griffin, and others. The data, with all the private information like investments and audits, “provides an unprecedented look inside [their] financial lives,” ProPublica said.
After Littlejohn was caught, Republicans on Capitol Hill tried to discover how much damage he did. For example, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked the IRS for the number of taxpayers and other entities whose private taxpayer information Littlejohn stole and then leaked. In May of last year, an IRS spokesman said the number was “more than 70,000.” But now, in a new response to Jordan, the IRS said it has “mailed notifications to 405,427 taxpayers whose taxpayer information was inappropriately disclosed by Mr. Littlejohn.” The IRS added that approximately 89% of those taxpayers were business entities. But even if that is the case, that means more than 40,000 of the taxpayers were individuals. That is a lot of privacy to violate.
Littlejohn pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information. It was a pretty good deal, considering what he had done. If Alvin Bragg, the Democratic district attorney who prosecuted Trump, were handling the case, he might have charged Littlejohn with 405,427 counts of disclosure, one for every person or financial entity he violated. As it was, after pleading guilty to that single count, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison, which was the maximum for that offense.
So now we know just how far-reaching Littlejohn’s crime was. The key fact, of course, is that his primary target was Donald Trump. Like so many Resistance talking heads in Washington and elsewhere, Littlejohn believed that Trump posed a danger to democracy, and that meeting that danger justified breaking the law. And now, with Trump again in the White House, the question is, is there another Charles Littlejohn out there somewhere in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy?