Then-U.S. President Donald Trump holds a news briefing at the White House on September 27, 2020, denying a New York Times report that he paid little or no taxes for years. Federal officials on Friday charged a government contractor with leaking the tax returns of a "high-ranking" official to the news media. File Photo by Chris Kleponis/UPI |
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Sept. 30 (UPI) -- The Justice Department has charged an Internal Revenue Service consultant with leaking the tax information of former President Donald Trump and "thousands" of other wealthy Americans to news organizations.
The department did not mention Trump by name in a statement issued Friday while announcing that IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, D.C., has been charged with stealing tax return information associated with a "high-ranking government official" and disclosing it to a news organization.
The DOJ also blamed Littlejohn for stealing tax return information for "thousands of the nation's wealthiest individuals" and disclosing that information to another unnamed news organization.
The government officer whose tax return data was stolen is identified only as "Public Official A," and the two news organizations were similarly not identified. However, the Washington Post reported the disclosures are linked to high-profile stories run by The New York Times and the news website ProPublica in 2020 and 2021.
Those stories detailed Trump's tax payments and highlighted how little the super-rich pay in federal income taxes.
Prosecutors charged Littlejohn with one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
ProPublica declined to comment on the charges.
"As we have said from the beginning, we do not know the identity of the source, so we have nothing further to say about the charges filed today," Stephen Engelberg, the news site's editor in chief, said in a statement.
The Times' story revealed that Trump, who was the first president in modern U.S. to refuse to release tax return information, paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, spurring calls by Democrats to release the former president's records, while Trump and his Republican backers said the leaks were politically motivated.
The ProPublica article cited "a vast trove of IRS data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people" showing that billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and businessmen Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros to show they did not pay federal income taxes in recent years.
The DOJ began an investigation into the leaks in 2021. Attorney General Attorney General Merrick Garland called them "an extremely serious matter" in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee.
