(Washington) A former employee of the US tax administration was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for leaking to the media the tax returns of a very senior official in 2020, the Department of Justice announced.
The department does not cite in its press release the name of former President Donald Trump or the media concerned.
But the facts and dates correspond to the publication in September 2020 by the New York Times tax returns of the president at the time, then those of the dissemination by the investigative media ProPublica in 2021 of a series of documents on tax evasion practiced by billionaires.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. He was sentenced to the maximum sentence.
“This conviction should serve as a warning to anyone considering imitating Mr. Littlejohn,” commented the Inspector General of the Tax Administration, Heather Hill, quoted in the press release.
The tax inspectorate “relentlessly investigates people who illegally consult and disclose information about taxpayers, regardless of their motivations,” she stressed.
Breaking with a long tradition, Donald Trump has always refused to publish his tax returns.
The investigation of New York Times of September 2020 claimed that he had paid only $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017, and none in 10 of the previous 15 years, due in part to significant loss declarations by his companies.
Furthermore, a judge in the Commercial Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York ordered him on January 12 to pay $392,638 to the New York Times and to journalists from the daily in court costs, after having dismissed his charges against them.
Their investigation, published in 2018 and rewarded in 2019 with the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, told how the former promoter, who claims to have made himself, had built his fortune. She assured that Donald Trump had in reality received from his father, over several years, the equivalent today of 413 million dollars which would have been partly transferred through a shell company, allowing them to escape tax.