OPINION:
The left shamelessly protects its own. Charles Edward Littlejohn, for example, admitted Thursday he pilfered 15 years’ worth of sensitive tax returns from thousands of filers. Despite pulling off one of the biggest privacy heists in history, prosecutors in the Department of Justice gave the serial thief a deal guaranteeing he won’t spend much time, if any, behind bars.
That’s because Littlejohn’s objective in leaking the documents was almost certainly to tilt the 2020 election in then-candidate Joe Biden’s favor. In 2019, he realized he could abuse his access as an IRS contractor to look up anyone’s tax returns — including those of Donald Trump, the sitting president.
Littlejohn used an elaborate subterfuge to sneak Mr. Trump’s tax returns out of a high-security facility so he could forward the records to The New York Times, which proceeded to publish a story with the headline “Long-concealed records show Trump’s chronic losses and years of tax avoidance” just five weeks before the election.
Then Littlejohn provided ProPublica what it called “An unprecedented trove of leaked IRS data.” The left-leaning website went on to create a series of more than 50 stories revealing purloined facts about prominent taxpayers, framing the material in ways that promoted legislation to raise taxes and “crack down” on individual retirement accounts.
The strategic accessing of tens of thousands of tax returns involved so many people that U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes waived the Crime Victims’ Rights Act notification provision saying, “the number of potential victims in this case makes it impracticable to provide all of the victims the rights provided under” the law.
Individuals will never know their returns were leaked unless they happen to stumble upon a webpage buried deep within the DOJ website.
When federal prosecutors went after Mr. Trump, they contorted the law to come up with 91 felony counts, purported crimes of which they could not identify a single victim. But Littlejohn’s trespass against thousands somehow merits a solitary count of improperly disclosing tax return information. The longest possible penalty Judge Reyes, who was appointed by President Biden, could impose is five years in prison, but sentencing guidelines can reduce that to a few months at most, or none at all.
The leaker surely knows that once he’s free, he’ll be rewarded for his service to causes held dear by the Democratic Party. He has seen how all of the other “resistance” celebrities elude punishment, or even end up with a job at a university, think tank or other liberal institution.
Then-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith forged evidence to frame Carter Page, a Trump campaign volunteer, as a foreign agent as part of a plot to perpetuate the Trump-Russia hoax. He received probation for his crime and even kept his law license.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe, another key figure in the Russia scandal, was fired for ethics violations. But as soon as the Biden administration assumed power, his back pay was restored and he was compensated with a job as a talking head on CNN and as a professor at George Mason University. Another fired FBI agent, Peter Strzok, was given a teaching job at Georgetown.
Unless this cycle of reward is broken, the crimes will continue.
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