A consultant who worked with the Internal Revenue Service has been charged with illegally leaking tax returns from former President Donald Trump — and several other billionaires — to two news organizations, reported ABC News on Friday.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, faces one count of unauthorized tax returns. In addition to leaking Trump's information to a news organization, he is also accused of taking records for "thousands of the nation's wealthiest individuals and" disclosing that information "to a separate news organization."
That news organization appears to be ProPublica, which used the data to publish a 2021 report revealing that Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos all pay extremely low income tax rates.
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According to the report, Littlejohn is likely to plead guilty to the charge, which carries with it a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Trump's tax returns were a focus of intense public interest and scrutiny for years, given that he had promised to disclose them — as almost all presidential candidates do — but ultimately reneged on that promise.
In 2020, The New York Times revealed some details after obtaining some of Trump's tax returns, including years of chronic losses on his properties that he used to avoid paying income taxes altogether in some years.
Then in 2022, the House Ways and Means Committee released six years of the former president's personal and business returns, revealing a similar pattern.
