BYRON YORK: IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns, but we’re now learning how much damage he really did.
For much of President Donald Trump‘s first term in office, the coalition of Democrats, activists, and media figures known collectively as the Resistance believed that obtaining Trump’s tax returns would be the key to bringing down the president. Finally, on Sept. 27, 2020, at the height of Trump’s reelection campaign, the New York Times reported that it had “obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office.” The paper published several long articles based on the information.
Voila! The Holy Grail of the Resistance! The problem was the stories came and went and did not become the huge, earthshaking scandal the anti-Trumpers had hoped. The long-awaited bombshells weren’t really bombshells, and the political world moved on.
The New York Times did not reveal, of course, how it had obtained the information. That did not happen until Sept. 29, 2023, when the Justice Department charged a man named Charles Edward Littlejohn with unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. Littlejohn was not an employee of the IRS. He worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which worked under contract for the IRS.
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Like so many Resistance talking heads in Washington and elsewhere, Littlejohn believed that Trump posed a danger to democracy, and that meeting that danger justified breaking the law. And now, with Trump again in the White House, the question is, is there another Charles Littlejohn out there somewhere in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy?
Only one?