The IRS consultant who leaked tax returns of then-President Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans pleaded with a judge to show leniency, casting himself as digital-era Robin Hood crusading to steal data from the privileged to “benefit society.”
Charles Littlejohn, scheduled to be sentenced Monday in federal court in Washington, said through his attorney that he now sees what he did was wrong. At the time, he felt righteous in his anger and justified in releasing information he felt the public had a right to see, even if the law disagreed.
Littlejohn said he was looking to do something big after learning of a distressing medical diagnosis for his father.
“If ever I found myself scared to push further I would think about everything I had done so far, everything that led up to this moment and I’d push through,” he wrote in his diary the day he first reached out to The New York Times to share Mr. Trump’s tax returns.
The newspaper reported the details in September 2020, just weeks before the presidential election.
At the same time he was leaking Mr. Trump’s information, Littlejohn was conducting searches to gather data on the wealthiest taxpayers and sending the data from IRS systems to his personal website. His attorney said he sat on the data for a couple of months until a close family friend died of cancer and he saw her death as a prod to take action. He took that second set of data to ProPublica.
“He originally acted out of a sense of moral duty, but soon came to understand that his conduct was morally wrong. Instead of saving the tax system, his actions had undermined the IRS, breached the public trust, and violated the privacy of thousands of American taxpayers,” Lisa Manning, his attorney, said in a sentencing memo to Judge Ana C. Reyes.
Prosecutors saw little moral wrestling in Littlejohn’s actions.
Calling him “dangerous and a threat to democracy,” they said he sought out an IRS consulting job in 2017 with the specific goal of stealing and leaking Mr. Trump’s data.
For the wealthy taxpayers, Littlejohn stole data well beyond basic tax returns. He leaked information about stock trades, gambling winnings and IRS audit determinations. He sought out the most “salacious” details because he wanted to get attention, Jonathan E. Jacobson, a Justice Department attorney, told the judge.
“Defendant essentially chose to take the law into his own hands. His disclosures were in fact part of a lawless, vigilante effort to circumvent the democratic process,” Mr. Jacobson said.
He pointed out that Congress released Mr. Trump’s tax returns through the appropriate legal process in late 2022.
Though the illegal disclosure had thousands of victims, prosecutors agreed to a plea deal with just one charge of unauthorized disclosure of secret taxpayer information.
The maximum penalty is five years. With no criminal history, Littlejohn would likely serve 4 to 10 months under sentencing guidelines.
Through his attorney, Littlejohn acknowledged that was probably too low, but he vehemently objected to prosecutors’ demand that he get the maximum five years.
He pointed to other IRS leak cases in which the penalty was probation.
“The defendant was wrong to violate the law even if he believed it would serve the public interest. It is also wrong for the Government to request six times the Guidelines maximum on the facts of this case,” Littlejohn’s attorney wrote.
Congressional Republicans say Littlejohn has already been shown enough leniency.
In a letter to the judge, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith and fellow Republicans on the panel that oversees the IRS said they want Littlejohn to get the maximum five-year penalty allowed.
“While we wish that prosecutors had pleaded him to additional counts, you still can impose a more serious sentence than the anticipated 8-to-14-month guideline range. In our view, the seriousness of the crimes and the context surrounding them justify an upward variance,” the lawmakers wrote.
They called the scope of the leak “unprecedented.”
Mr. Jacobson, the federal prosecutor, agreed with that assessment. He pointed out that the court had to create special rules for victim notification in this case because so many were personally harmed that it was impossible to notify them all in any substantive way.
Littlejohn’s attorney acknowledged that he had numerous advantages in life and that “it is hard to understand why a man with such respect for the law and government systems would violate them so completely.”
For an answer, the lawyer quoted from a character letter written on behalf of Littlejohn blaming the politics of the moment.
“Mr. Littlejohn is not a menace to society; he is a principled, if flawed, man, who acted irrationally in the midst of what has been a trying, highly emotional time for our country,” said the letter writer, whose name was redacted in the public filing.
Littlejohn, 38, whose friends call him Chaz, said he fears the toll a lengthy sentence would take on his relationship with his girlfriend of four years and their chance to have children.
In her character letter, she said: “Mr. Littlejohn sacrificed his future aspirations committing this crime and received nothing for it. He lost the ability to hold a normal job, time with his father and watching his nieces and nephew grow up, starting a family with me. The only reason he would do this is if he believed he was contributing to the greater good by providing invaluable information to the public.”
She added: “He never thought of the ripple effect his conduct would create upon those he’s loved, and he’ll carry that weight for the rest of his life.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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