The Internal Revenue Service recently awarded a lucrative contract to help modernize its computer databases to the same Washington firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, that employed the man who pleaded guilty last week to stealing and leaking thousands of private tax returns of wealthy Americans, including former President Trump, according to records reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.
The massive IRS theft is the third major breach of confidential and classified government information by Booz Allen contractors over the last decade – including Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak exposing the National Security Agency’s worldwide anti-terror surveillance program.
Cyber-thief Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn was working on an IRS contract for Booz Allen in 2018 when he stole more than two decades of Trump’s personal tax records from IRS computers. He later leaked them to the New York Times, which published negative stories on Trump’s long-sought returns several weeks before the 2020 election, which Trump narrowly lost in a handful of battleground states.
After the election, Littlejohn leaked a trove of sensitive IRS data on Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires – including major conservative donors – to ProPublica. The left-leaning news site used them to write a series, “The Secret IRS Files,” about how the rich use loopholes and tricks to avoid paying taxes. Congressional Democrats cited the series in their push for higher taxes on the wealthy.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba said she suspects Littlejohn was an operative in a broader political conspiracy to sabotage the former president before the 2020 election.
“What Mr. Littlejohn did, I do not believe he did alone,” she said last week at the Washington courthouse where he pleaded guilty. Habba added that the leak probably “cost my client thousands of votes and was all by design.”
A Democrat donor, Littlejohn struck a deal with federal prosecutors in which he copped to a single count of disclosing tax information without authorization. Though facing a maximum of five years, his plea deal calls for an estimated range of eight to 14 months when he is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 29.
“That looked more like a Hunter Biden plea deal,” Habba said. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) agreed, saying Littlejohn is getting a “slap on the wrist.”