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.
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.
If society survives long enough for this to become history, the act will be seen as as heroic. The hardest thing for the relatively comfortable, myself included, to do these days is risk that relative comfort and sacrifice our futures (civil and professional) for something that acts against all of the slow motion attacks on democracy going on right now. I don't know enough about him individually to say, but the act on its face us heroic and needed.
It's not corruption when he's pardoning someone for doing what is right.
Whether he benefits from it or not is completely irrelevant. Just because it does benefit him doesn't change the fact that what that fellow did was moral and he's being wrongly punished for it.
Your logic can be used to justify not enforcing the 14th amendment on Trump.
He already pleaded guilty, but then got hit with the maximum sentence (seemingly from pressure from people like Rick Scott). He's still trying to fight it out legally and his friends put together a gofundme to help cover his legal fees, but a pressure campaign for a pardon doesn't sound like a half bad idea either.
The judge compared his actions to Jan 6 -- so if Trump's elected, he'll surely pardon this guy, right?? Trump was going to release that stuff anyway, he just couldn't because mumbles into hand and then trails off