Trump Tax Leaker Gets The Hunter Biden Treatment With ‘Sweetheart Deal’ From DOJ

While Peter Navarro is jailed for defying the January 6th set up hoax: DEMOCRAT TYRANNY: Trump White House Official Peter Navarro Sentenced to Jail for Defying Jan 6 Kangaroo Court Subpoena

This isn’t two tiered justice. This is no justice at all.

Trump Tax Leaker Gets The Hunter Biden Treatment With ‘Sweetheart Deal’ From DOJ

By: Paul Sperry, The Federalist, January 26, 2024:

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Another apparent “sweetheart deal” negotiated by President Biden’s Justice Department in a politically charged case is drawing scrutiny.

Former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, who stole and helped publicize the confidential tax records of Donald Trump and an estimated 7,500 other wealthy Americans, could face little or no jail time when he’s sentenced later this month, because the DOJ allowed him to plead guilty to a single felony count.

In a new court filing, prosecutors acknowledge the plea deal “does not account for the fact that he leaked thousands of individuals’ tax returns. His [sentencing] range would be the same today if he had leaked only a single return.”

But instead of seeking prison time for each of his offenses — or even for the two separate mass thefts he committed, one in 2019 and another in 2020 — the DOJ is asking a federal judge to sentence Littlejohn to just 60 months, the maximum for a single offense under the statute. Some political leaders angry over the plea deal say he should get 60 years, not months, for his crime — the biggest heist of IRS taxpayer data in history.

Attorneys for Littlejohn, 38, argue he actually deserves an even lower sentence, closer to the presentencing report’s range of four to 10 months, in part because he leaked the reams of stolen private income-tax data to “reputable news organizations — The New York Times and ProPublica — that he knew would handle the information responsibly.” They say a 60-month term is “equivalent to a 15-level upward departure” from the range prosecutors originally agreed to in the plea deal, and such a wide departure would be unprecedented.

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The D.C. judge deciding Littlejohn’s fate “does not have unfettered discretion to depart from the applicable sentencing guidelines,” Littlejohn’s attorney Lisa Manning advised the court in papers filed last week.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee who has a record of meting out lenient sentences, will decide his punishment on Jan. 29.

The Times and ProPublica published dozens of stories based on the personal tax files the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor electronically smuggled out of the IRS. Those articles largely advanced Democratic calls for further investigations into Trump and the need to raise taxes on the wealthy.

Against the backdrop of prosecutions of Donald Trump in an election year and the collapse of Hunter Biden’s earlier no-jail plea deal, which a Delaware judge rejected because it was “not straightforward” and contained “atypical provisions,” Littlejohn’s plea agreement is raising new questions about the politicization of justice.

Trump lawyer Alina Habba said Littlejohn’s admission of guilt looks “more like a Hunter Biden plea deal.” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith agreed, complaining he’s getting off “with just a slap on the wrist.”

At a minimum, the Missouri Republican argues, Littlejohn, a Democrat donor who sought to damage Trump soon after his 2016 election, should have been charged with two “separate and distinct” unauthorized disclosures — one of Trump’s returns to the Times in 2019 and the separate tranche of thousands of returns he delivered to ProPublica in 2020.

“While some argue that he should have been charged with one count per taxpayer, it is clear to us that at a minimum he should have been charged with two counts of unauthorized disclosure and potentially with at least one count of obstruction of justice,” Smith wrote the DOJ in a recent letter, noting that Littlejohn took a number of measures to foil investigators.

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Prosecutors say his victims total “over 1,000.” But the number of taxpayers whose privacy he violated could run in the several thousand.

According to recent court papers, Littlejohn rejoined Booz Allen in 2017 with the express purpose of getting assigned to the IRS and stealing Trump’s tax returns, which he downloaded in 2018. Then in June 2020, he began conducting searches of the IRS database to pull historic tax data on the wealthiest taxpayers in the country. Specifically, he constructed a query designed to call up the top 500 taxpayers by income by year for the previous 15 years. After running the query, he stole the entire data set, put it on a flash drive, and gave it to reporters at ProPublica, a left-leaning nonprofit funded by George Soros and other wealthy liberal donors. ProPublica, in turn, published nearly 50 articles using the purloined tax returns to show how the rich use loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying taxes. Congressional Democrats cited the series in their push for higher taxes on the wealthy.

There are so many victims of Littlejohn’s breach of protected taxpayer information — the largest in history — that DOJ has asked a federal judge in Washington for permission to create a public website to notify victims without reaching out to each person individually. Taxpayers will have to proactively search the site to discover if their most private financial records have been compromised.

“[The] number of potential victims in this case makes it impracticable to provide all of the victims the rights provided under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act,” the department said.