Some info on who stole Trump's and 400,000 other people's tax returns. The IRS is not even at fault....
Gemini A I
It was an outside contractor, NOT an IRS employee, and he stole vastly more than just Donald Trump’s tax information.
Here are the specific details of what happened:
Who Leaked the Information?
The leaker was Charles Edward Littlejohn. He was not a direct employee of the IRS; he was a tech contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a major defense and technology consulting firm that held contracts with the IRS.
Federal prosecutors later revealed that Littlejohn actually sought out and took the contracting job with the specific, politically motivated intent of gaining access to Trump's tax returns to leak them to the media. He was caught, pleaded guilty, and in January 2024, he was sentenced to the maximum five years in federal prison.
Did He Leak More Than Just Trump's Taxes?
Yes, by an enormous margin. This has been described as the largest data breach in IRS history.
The Scope: While initial reports estimated he took data from a few thousand wealthy people, the IRS later disclosed to Congress that Littlejohn stole and leaked the confidential tax data of 405,427 taxpayers.
Who Was Targeted: Roughly 89% of those records belonged to business entities, but the breach also targeted 15 years of tax records for the highest-net-worth individuals in the United States.
The Media Outlets: Littlejohn split his stolen data between two major news organizations:
The New York Times received Donald Trump's tax information (which they published in 2020).
ProPublica received the massive trove of data regarding America's wealthiest billionaires—including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—which they used for a 2021 series exposing how little the ultra-wealthy pay in federal income taxes.
The IRS has since stated that they found no evidence Littlejohn distributed the data anywhere else online or that it was used for identity theft, as his sole motivation was getting the data to the press.
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