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- cross-posted to:
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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.
You’d have thought he was Russian opposition and he had revealed something about Putin!
You laugh, but the only other 5 year sentence I can think of in this whole situation is Reality Winner, the biggest unspoken hero of the last decade who leaked the Russian Interference information to the press. I guarantee we wouldn’t know that happened if it weren’t for her. And yet, quoting the wikipedia entry on her: “No one has ever received a longer sentence for leaking classified information to a media outlet”
Now I can name somebody else who has (if the crime was technically different).