- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
The man who stole and leaked former President Donald Trump and thousands of other’s tax records has been sentenced to five years in prison.
In October, Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosures of income tax returns. According to his plea agreement, he stole Trump’s tax returns along with the tax data of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” while working for a consulting firm with contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.
Littlejohn leaked the information to two news outlets and deleted the documents from his IRS-assigned laptop before returning it and covered the rest of his digital tracks by deleting places where he initially stored the information.
Judge Ana Reyes highlighted the gravity of the crime, saying multiple times that it amounted to an attack against the US and its legal foundation.
Yet holding onto classified documents, then hiding them and lying about it to investigators for months gets nothing but a very stern finger-wagging?
It may still come to bite him in the ass. The trial is actually scheduled to May this year but the scheduling will be looked at in March. The charges themselves are pretty serious, I think it was something like 30 charges under the espionage act and 10 charges for obstruction of justice or false statements.
There’s a reason Trump wants to postpone it until after the election. His only shot at wiggling out of it is by becoming president.