Main Culprit Still at Large

IRS subcontractor pleads guilty to stealing Americans' tax records

On January 29^th, 2024, Charles Littlejohn pled guilty in U.S. district court to the theft of the private tax returns for then President Trump. The pilfered records were divulged to the New York Times, which published them in the summer of 2020, hoping to damage the Donald just before the General Election. Though Littlejohn will spend the next five years in the pokey, the real criminal in this case is still at large, that being the Internal Revenue Service.

Charles Littlejohn was an accountant affiliated with a consulting firm, one amongst thousands of civilian subcontractors who interface with the federal government. Taking advantage of his under-supervised access to Americans’ tax records, Littlejohn immediately targeted Donald Trump’s private tax returns, leading some investigators to suspect that he took the job precisely for this purpose. Littlejohn purloined the records by downloading them on the sly onto his iPod. The New York Times that summer timed the exposé perfectly for maximum fallout prior to the presidential election.

Not stopping at Trump, Littlejohn next siphoned the private tax returns for thousands of wealthy and famous citizens, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. This confidential data he then shared with ProPublica, a public-interest website. Though Littlejohn’s first target was the elected president, a public official, his subsequent targets held no public office, and their only crime in Littlejohn’s mind was that they were too successful.

There are some good-faith arguments in favor of public officials’ tax disclosures. Those in this camp believe that the citizenry has a right to know what sources of personal revenue candidates have, and some countries even require such disclosures. In the United States, it is unrequired, but since Richard Nixon presidential candidates have voluntarily disclosed their tax returns. Donald Trump bucked the practice, probably realizing that you cannot have good-faith disclosures of personal income when they’ll be met with bad-faith cancel culture which attempts to foreclose those sources of income, as Trump has repeatedly experienced from his critics. Even the Gray Lady left a mistaken impression when it covered Trump’s tax returns; by stating that in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 Trump had paid only $750 in federal income taxes, it led readership to think that Trump had evaded taxes, which in fact he had just avoided them, a legal distinction which everyone should exploit if able.

Even if you are partisan to the formula of “orange man bad,” consider your own income tax returns for a moment (if you file them). How comfortable would you be with a disgruntled neighbor, competitor, employee, prospective employer or ex gaining access to detailed declarations which are supposed to be exclusively between you and the Internal Revenue Service? Every year the IRS demands and compiles unfathomably vast amounts of data about us, and it is all there for the taking. The Federal Bureau of Investigations estimates that tens of thousands of Americans every year fall prey to identity theft due to intercepted tax returns, amongst other causes.

Javelin Strategy and Research calculates that Americans in 2020 suffered $56 billion in private losses due to identity theft, some of this related to data captured from tax returns. These are in some instances insurmountable private losses in order to prop up a federal government which no one would concede wisely spends our money!

Apart from the losses which we may suffer by criminally appropriated data which the IRS demands, there have been instances of the IRS specifically targeting taxpayers for political reasons. Most of us remember IRS lackey Lois Lerner who obstructed conservative organizations from acquiring tax-exempt status for fundraising purposes just prior to 2012’s election, based purely on their ideology. Progressives at the time countered that the IRS was also obstructing exemptions for liberal organizations… which is precisely the problem! We have a governmental agency aggregating data about us, and we may never know when said agency may be weaponized against us, a practice dating back at least to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, who sicced the IRS on critics of his New Deal.

Libertarians say (often and loudly) that taxation is theft, as there is a moral dilemma with the act of coercing money from someone rather than earning it by offering a valuable exchange. Just as validly, though, all Americans should oppose the Internal Revenue Service on grounds that it unconscionably and dangerously intrudes on our most sensitive financial details. Immediately is not soon enough to decommission an agency which outright steals our sustenance and leaves us vulnerable to others with even worse intentions!