A judge grilled a Department of Justice prosecutor on Monday over why the government charged Charles Littlejohn with just one count of unauthorized disclosure of taxes after Littlejohn leaked the private information of more than a thousand taxpayers to media in 2020.
“The fact that he is facing one felony count, I have no words for,” Judge Ana Reyes said during Littlejohn’s sentencing hearing.
Littlejohn, a former Internal Revenue Service contractor, is set to be sentenced Monday for the single charge, and the DOJ has asked Reyes to give him five years in prison, which is the maximum sentence for it.
Littlejohn admitted to prosecutors last fall that he carried out a plot that involved carefully working around IRS protocols to access Trump’s returns and thousands of returns from other wealthy people, according to court filings. Littlejohn said he then leaked the returns to the New York Times and ProPublica.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), whose taxes were among those Littlejohn leaked, also appeared at the hearing to give a victim impact statement.
Scott said Littlejohn’s agreement with the DOJ “should be called the plea deal of the century.”
“He will be punished for just one violation and not thousands,” Scott lamented.
The judge’s remarks came as she was pressuring the DOJ attorney to reconcile why the one charge for the defendant should deviate so far outside standard sentencing guidelines, which a probation office calculated would typically put him at about 18 months in prison.
The DOJ attorney explained that Littlejohn had committed “one of the most serious crimes in the IRS’s history.”
He said the five-year sentence would be one that “communicates to the public that individuals who weaponize their privileged access to private data … will face grave and serious consequences.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The judge countered that Littlejohn had no criminal past and cooperated with the government, factors she said she also has an obligation to consider.
Reyes asked that if she did not weigh these, “doesn’t that also send a message?”