House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith urged a federal judge to throw the book at a left-wing IRS consultant who leaked the tax returns of former President Donald Trump and thousands of other private citizens, saying a lenient sentence would encourage similar crimes.
“The prosecution of Charles Edward Littlejohn for illegally leaking President Trump’s tax returns to ProPublica and the New York Times will fail to deter future IRS leakers unless the sentence imposed in this case sends a strong message to other would-be criminals,” the Missouri Republican said in a statement Wednesday to Breitbart.
In October, Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty to one count of illegally stealing tax return information and disclosing it to the media from 2018 to 2020 while working as an IRS consultant.