A former IRS employee has received a five-year prison sentence for unlawfully releasing the tax information of affluent Americans.
The Justice Department’s pardon database indicates that the Biden administration is considering a sentence commutation for Charles Littlejohn. This former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employee was convicted for illegally disclosing the tax returns of wealthy individuals, including President-elect Donald Trump.
Littlejohn’s potential clemency comes as President Biden, nearing the end of his term, has granted a record number of pardons and commutations, including those for his son, Hunter Biden, on tax evasion and firearm charges.
Littlejohn, involved in what’s been termed the largest IRS data breach in history, received the maximum five-year prison sentence last month following an October 2024 guilty plea. He admitted to stealing and leaking the tax records of numerous high-profile Americans to the New York Times and ProPublica.
In September 2020, The New York Times published an article revealing that Trump had declared only $750 in federal income taxes for both 2016 and 2017, and in most years reported no tax liability due to greater losses than income. ProPublica subsequently released related articles in 2021 based on the leaked data.
Neither news organization that used the leaked data in articles before and after the 2020 election has faced accusations of wrongdoing. Following the September 2023 disclosure of the breach by the Department of Justice (DOJ), The New York Times’ editor defended the press’s right to publish legally obtained newsworthy information. ProPublica stated to CNN that they did not know the identity of their source.
After some of Trump’s tax records were publicly released by congressional Democrats in late 2022, the President-elect—who had previously declined to release his returns, citing an ongoing IRS audit—claimed the filings demonstrated his financial success.
“The Trump tax returns once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use tax depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises,” he stated.