A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the five-year prison sentence of Charles Littlejohn, a former Internal Revenue Service consultant who stole and leaked the tax records of President Donald Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans.

Background

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Littlejohn’s arguments that his sentence was procedurally flawed or excessive, ruling that the district court acted within its discretion when it issued the statutory maximum penalty.

Court documents state that Littlejohn applied for a position as an IRS consultant in 2017 with the specific objective of accessing and disclosing Trump’s tax information. To bypass detection systems, Littlejohn utilized generalized search parameters within an IRS database, uploaded the data to a private website, and later transferred the information to personal storage devices.

In 2019, Littlejohn provided the records to a reporter for the New York Times, which published articles based on the data shortly before the 2020 presidential election. Littlejohn stated that he “felt that the American people should have the opportunity to see the tax returns of the sitting president before they decided on how they were going to vote.”

Consequences

Littlejohn also extracted and leaked the tax data of approximately 600 corporate entities and 7,600 wealthy individuals to the investigative journalism outlet ProPublica. He noted that he “also felt that taxpayers as a whole deserved to know just how easy it was for the wealthiest among us to avoid paying into our system.”

ProPublica subsequently published dozens of articles utilizing data from at least 152 individuals, and retains additional unpublished material.

Littlejohn must also serve three years of supervised release, perform 300 hours of community service, and pay a $5,000 fine following his prison term.

Original reporting: Tampa Free Press — read the source article.