President Joe Biden should commute the sentence of Charles Littlejohn, the former IRS contractor who was sentenced in January 2024 to five years in prison. By disclosing the federal tax records of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires to news organizations, Littlejohn enabled vital reporting about how the wealthiest people in the United States end up paying less in taxes than public school teachers and firefighters.
We’re urging people to urge the president to act while he still has the power to do so. Our website, freecharleslittlejohn.com, facilitates the process of sending an email or a letter to the president asking him to commute Littlejohn’s sentence.
Despite performing a valuable public service, Littlejohn received the harshest possible punishment. While sentencing guidelines recommended four to 10 months in prison, District Judge Ana Reyes gave Littlejohn the statutory maximum sentence of five years. Remarkably, this punishment is far more severe than what wealthy Americans convicted of tax evasion typically face. Many cases that involve tax evasion do not even lead to a criminal indictment. Other cases have not resulted in jail time.
Even when there is a prison sentence for tax evasion, it’s often substantially shorter than Littlejohn’s. Just this year, for example, an Oklahoma man instructed a payroll company working to falsely characterize over $2.6 million as reimbursements rather than income. His sentence for that massive fraud: 30 months, just one-half Littlejohn’s 60-month sentence.
Lighter sentences also have been imposed in cases involving massive leaks of private information. In one case, three Department of Homeland Security employees stole personally identifying information of 200,000 federal government employees from government databases, along with proprietary software, and passed it on to software developers in India. Despite having sought to personally benefit from the leak, they were sentenced far more leniently — four and 18 month prison terms for two of them and two years’ probation for the third — than Littlejohn, who gained nothing personally from his actions.
Judge Reyes condemned Littlejohn to five years behind bars after 25 congressional Republicans — undoubtedly at the behest of their super-rich patrons — wrote to her and requested the toughest possible sentence. That Reyes gave such a disproportionate punishment to someone who shed light on the scope of tax injustice in the U.S. reflects the extent to which our society is dominated by the interests of the ultra-wealthy.
Reyes opined that Littlejohn’s actions constituted “an attack on our constitutional democracy” — one even worse than the deadly assault carried out by Jan. 6 insurrectionists, who sought to block certification of Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump. Frankly, this contention is absurd. Littlejohn’s effort to expose the extent of tax injustice in the U.S. was aimed at preserving the promise of democracy, which is imperiled by extreme inequality.
Actually, Judge Reyes’ harsh sentencing poses a far greater threat to democracy than anything Littlejohn did. Had Littlejohn leaked the tax records of several hundred bartenders and hair stylists who had failed to report tip income, he almost certainly would not have been sentenced to six times the recommended sentence. Which means that the sentence he received was based not on the nature of his act but on the power of those aggrieved by it.
The Orwellian logic Reyes invoked in her sentencing opinion should frighten all of us. Exposing the tax information of people whose information is in the public interest — a sitting president refusing to divulge information pertinent to his re-election campaign and billionaires whose avoidance activities are undermining the integrity of the tax system — is, according to her logic, a far more serious offense than exposing tax information that should be of interest to nobody other than the IRS. The message is clear: Those with wealth or power are to be afforded greater legal protection than the rest of us.
President-elect Trump has pledged to pardon individuals who were convicted for participating in his Jan. 6 coup attempt. Notably, many of the rioters received sentences shorter than Littlejohn’s and shorter than prosecutors sought. It would be a perversion of justice if they are pardoned while Littlejohn is required to serve his full sentence. Littlejohn, who began his sentence on May 1, has already spent ample time locked up.
The longer Littlejohn languishes in jail, the more he is at risk of retribution from Trump. The president-elect has vowed to persecute his political enemies, including an ominous threat to “root out” those he describes as “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Given the outsized role Littlejohn had in exposing Trump’s extreme tax avoidance, including possible IRS audit exposure, he very well could be on Trump’s enemies list.
As White House staff reportedly consider mass pardons for current and former public officials potentially at risk of a revenge-seeking Trump, Biden should extend protection to Littlejohn — a selfless defender of tax fairness and democracy who may well be one of Trump’s targets.
Bob Lord, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, currently serves as senior vice president, tax policy, at Patriotic Millionaires. Kenny Stancil is a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project.
