A suspect has been charged in connection with the illegal disclosure of thousands of wealthy individuals’ tax returns, which may include those of former President Donald Trump.
The Department of Justice announced in a Friday news release that Charles Littlejohn, 38, was charged with one count of “unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information.”
Littlejohn, a former IRS consultant based in Washington, D.C., is accused of stealing and leaking the tax return information of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals.”
This included an unidentified “high-ranking government official,” whom multiple outlets, including Fox News, have reported to be Trump.
Littlejohn allegedly shared the stolen data with two left-wing media outlets: The New York Times and ProPublica.
The alleged theft of the tax return information occurred between 2018 and 2020, while Littlejohn was working as a contractor for the tax agency, according to Fox.
Fox reported that “a guilty plea is in the works.”
After receiving Trump’s tax returns in September 2020, the Times published a series of revealing articles on his finances, alleging “chronic losses and years of tax avoidance.”
“The New York Times has 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 outlet said at the time.
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Trump’s tax returns, as the Times noted, were “some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory.”
Not long after, ProPublica obtained a trove of IRS data and detailed the tax records of some of the top earners in America.
These included billionaires such as Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Elon Musk and many others — whom ProPublica alleged pay little, or sometimes nothing, in income tax.
Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, maintains that they “do not know the identity of the source” and therefore “have nothing further to say about the charges filed today” against Littlejohn.
IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a written statement that “any disclosure of taxpayer information is unacceptable.”
“The IRS has put in place new protocols and protections that tightened security, and our aggressive work in this critical area continues in order to protect the tax and financial information of taxpayers,” he said, according to The Washington Post.
Littlejohn faces up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the DOJ.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is investigating the case.
