Attempts to retrieve Donald Trump’s tax returns yields 18-month prison sentence

A computer criminal convicted in connection with trying to illegally obtain President Trump’s tax returns has been sentenced to serve 18 months in federal prison.

Jordan Hamlett, a former private investigator from Sunset, Louisiana, learned his fate during a hearing held in Baton Rouge federal court Wednesday before U.S. District Judge John W. deGravelles, the Justice Department announced.

Hamlett, 32, pleaded guilty in December to false representation of a Social Security number, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment, after investigators repeatedly caught him using Mr. Trump’s personal information while attempting to acquire his widely sought tax returns.

According to his guilty plea, Hamlett used Mr. Trump’s Social Security number, date of birth and other information to fill out an online form designed to let current and prospective college students determine if they’re eligible for government assistance, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, in September 2016 near the end of the president’s successful election campaign.

Hamlett subsequently obtained a Federal Student Aid Identification — an electronic ID needed to access various related government websites — and used that account to try to retrieve Mr. Trump’s tax returns through an IRS online data retrieval tool, he admitted to prosecutors.

“After obtaining the FSA ID, the defendant, using the IRS Data Retrieval Tool, unlawfully attempted to obtain the presidential candidate’s federal tax information from the Internal Revenue Service,” according to his guilty plea. “The defendant made six separate attempts to obtain the federal tax information from IRS servers, but he was unsuccessful.”

Hamlett said he obtained Mr. Trump’s Social Security number through a simple Google search, and his defense attorney, Michael Fiser, argued that his client attempted to retrieve the president’s tax returns “out of sheer curiosity,” The Associated Press reported.

“Everything that Mr. Hamlett did in this case was something a teenager could do,” Mr. Fiser said.

Indeed, the IRS acknowledged in April 2017 that the government had issued about 8,000 fraudulent tax returns totaling roughly $30 million because criminals leveraged a security bug involving the FAFSA and IRS website and potentially compromised the personal information of up to 100,000 U.S. taxpayers.

The unsuccessful attempt to retrieve Mr. Trump tax returns occurred less than two months before he defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Mr. Trump declined to release his tax returns while campaigning and afterwards, citing an ongoing audit, separating himself from every other major party nominee since the 1970s.

Hamlett was also ordered to pay nearly $15,000 in restitution and serve two years of supervised release once his prison stint expires, the DOJ said in a statement. He’s scheduled to report to prison May 28.

“I’m sorry for all of this. I regret my actions. I was trying to help, and I made a bad decision,” he said at his sentencing hearing, The Advocate newspaper reported. “It was a mistake and a bad mistake. The lesson’s been learned.”