Charles Littlejohn pleaded guilty last year to one count of unauthorized disclosure of income tax returns, a rarely prosecuted crime that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Littlejohn, 38, admitted that he leaked Trump’s confidential tax information to the New York Times in 2019 and then replicated his work the next year, filtering the tax returns and financial data of thousands of wealthy Americans to ProPublica.
The news organizations published reports showing how Trump and the richest Americans for years paid little or no federal taxes. U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, who will be handing down Littlejohn’s sentence, emphasized at his plea hearing in October that “there will be serious consequences for this illegal act.” Regardless of Littlejohn’s motivations, the judge said, “people taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable.”