On Monday in Washington, D.C., Charles E. Littlejohn faces the music. Whether he hears “Marche Funèbre” or The Benny Hill Show’s theme song erupt in the courtroom, we find out shortly after 10 a.m.
Littlejohn, a Booz Allen Hamilton employee contracted to perform work for the IRS, surreptitiously obtained Donald Trump’s tax returns and leaked them to press outlets, including the New York Times. “After applying to work as an IRS consultant with the intention of accessing and disclosing tax returns,” prosecutors alleged, “Defendant weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law.”
If the story ended there, one might regard the plea deal as appropriate. It posits that Littlejohn committed a single offense of unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information and should go to prison for eight to 14 months. But it also details other offenses that surely look like crimes that merit prosecution beyond a solitary charge.
“In or about July and August 2020, Defendant accessed unmasked IRS data associated with thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, including returns and return information dating back over 15 years,” the plea agreement states. “He uploaded the information and then provided it to ProPublica, which published 50 articles on what it called a “massive trove of tax information … covering thousands of America’s wealthiest individuals.”
Those whose privacy Littlejohn invaded include Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, George Soros, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg. Much of the public may find it hard to view the ultrawealthy as victims. But they retain privacy rights like the rest of us do. Their business is none of ours, and the principle of equal justice under law applies to them as victims as it does to them as perpetrators.
The plea agreement notes that Littlejohn deleted almost all of the files on his IRS laptop and did the same with the “virtual machines” he employed in his criminal scheme. “After uploading the taxpayer returns and return information to the private website he had recently created,” the plea agreement notes, “Defendant promptly contacted the domain registration service to cancel the private website’s domain registration.”
Is there some charge associated with destroying evidence of the commission of a crime or does this fall under the BleachBit precedent of offenders who do not offend D.C. sensibilities — 5 percent of them voted for Donald Trump in 2020 — retaining an invisible get-out-of-jail-free card?
The Justice Department’s treating the publication of Trump’s private tax returns as a scofflaw offense joins its surveillance on his 2016 campaign using Hillary Clinton’s opposition research as the pretext for a warrant and trampling over attorney-client privilege in forcing his personal lawyer to act as a witness against him in undermining the public’s trust in federal law enforcement. Trump faces 717.5 years in prison for doing what Stacey Abrams did in Georgia (question the legitimacy of election results); what Joe Biden did with classified documents not as president but as senator and vice president; and what rarely gets charged in New York, what rarer still results in conviction, and which never amounts to a case with no complainant victim — to note a few of the legal handicaps interfering with the 2024 election.
This criminal use of law threatens a basic principle of the American republic — that the people rather than the beautiful people determine election results. It also explains why Donald Trump can behave in sundry uncouth ways — he swore and questioned whether the governor of New Hampshire was “on something” during his victory speech this week — with his support not only intact but hardened. The Trump voter is trauma-bonded to his or her candidate and grants an understandable pass for bad behavior given the unprecedented weaponization of the state to derail — and destroy really — the presumptive Republican nominee. The man is under an awful lot of stress, after all.
The political activist who allegedly bored into the IRS to wage politics by other means numbers as one of many — the Resistance — who imagine it as appropriate to politicize tax-funded jobs. This is so very Peru.
From Nebraska, Michigan, Arkansas, and points beyond, voters, who favor Trump over Biden, clearly see the injustice of it all. Far from the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse, one can even now faintly hear the sounds of “Yakety Sax.”
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