US tax contractor charged with leaking Donald Trump’s returns
- Charles Edward Littlejohn is accused of stealing the tax information of the ex-US president and other wealthy Americans and giving it to media outlets
- News reports from the time period said Trump paid US$750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House and no income tax at all some years
A former contractor for the Internal Revenue Service was charged on Friday with leaking tax information to news outlets about thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, including then-US President Donald Trump.
Charles Edward Littlejohn, 38, of Washington is accused of stealing the tax return information and giving it to two different news outlets between 2018 and 2020, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Littlejohn declined to comment when reached by Associated Press, which also left a message for his lawyer, Lisa Manning.
Both organisations published numerous articles about the tax information, some of which dated back more than 15 years, charging documents state.
The outlets are not named in charging documents, but the description and time frame align with stories about Trump’s tax returns in The New York Times and reporting about wealthy Americans’ taxes in the non-profit investigative journalism organisation ProPublica.
