Outgoing President Joe Biden should grant a pardon to Charles Littlejohn, the IRS contractor sentenced to five years in prison for leaking tax information about President-elect Donald Trump, Rolling Stone's Bob Lord and Kenny Stancil wrote in an impassioned plea in Rolling Stone published on Wednesday.
Trump was infamous throughout his first term for keeping his tax returns under wraps, the first major party candidate in decades to do so, despite promises to release them after an "audit" had been completed. Some of that information was revealed in 2020 and published by The New York Times.
Littlejohn did not reap any personal gain from what he did, Lord and Stancil noted — his leak of the information on Trump's taxes, as well as those of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, was purely in the service of public record. And yet, "Remarkably, this punishment is far more severe than what wealthy Americans convicted of tax evasion typically face.
"Many cases that involve tax evasion do not even lead to a criminal indictment. Other cases have not resulted in jail time." Indeed, they noted, a case in Oklahoma this year in which a man ordered a payroll company to falsify $2.6 million to avoid taxes resulted in a sentence half as long as Littlejohn's.
Worse still, they continued, "Lighter sentences also have been imposed in cases involving massive leaks of private information. In one case, three Department of Homeland Security employees stole personally identifying information of 200,000 federal government employees from government databases, along with proprietary software, and passed it on to software developers in India. Despite having sought to personally benefit from the leak, they were sentenced far more leniently — four and 18 month prison terms for two of them and two years’ probation for the third — than Littlejohn, who gained nothing personally from his actions."
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The reason Littlejohn's sentence was so harsh, they said, is that several members of Congress wrote to Judge Ana Reyes demanding the book be thrown at him — and Biden should reverse this double standard of justice before Trump takes control of the justice system.
"The longer Littlejohn languishes in jail, the more he is at risk of retribution from Trump," they concluded. "The president-elect has vowed to persecute his political enemies, including an ominous threat to 'root out' those he describes as 'radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.' Given the outsized role Littlejohn had in exposing Trump’s extreme tax avoidance, including possible IRS audit exposure, he very well could be on Trump’s enemies list."