WSJ finally found the man who risked it all to reveal the tax frauds of Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk | CPT PPP Coverage

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The contractor, Charles Littlejohn, admitted in October that he illegally accessed and shared tax return information without permission. He did this twice, sending tax records of Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk to two different news outlets.

The first time, he gave The New York Times 20 years of Trump’s tax returns in 2019, which the newspaper used to write a story in September 2020.

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The drama, the investigation

The federal agents who investigated this leak had a hard time finding the culprit, partly because of Littlejohn’s technical expertise, The Journal said, based on people who knew about the matter. The Journal said the agents were not sure if the leak came from inside or outside the government, or how the leaker got the documents.

Feds had to drop this investigation because they did not have enough solid evidence. But later, they started a new investigation into another leak that involved ProPublica, which published many articles in 2021 about the tax returns of very rich Americans like Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Musk, the CEO of SpaceX.

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The huge amount of data that ProPublica got, which included tax information of thousands of people, made the agents think that someone from the IRS had leaked it, The Journal said. Then, they checked the search history of employees and contractors to see if anyone had made suspicious queries that were not related to their work, The Journal said, quoting the same unnamed sources.

The Journal said these checks did not yield any results, but the agents finally had a breakthrough in their search and zeroed in on Littlejohn. The contractor admitted that he was the one who leaked the data to ProPublica — and also to The Times.

Littlejohn will be sentenced on Monday for one charge of taking tax return information without authorization, because the time limit for the 2019 leak of Trump’s returns had expired.

Tax leaks unveil wealthy American faces

The explosive stories by The Times and ProPublica based on Littlejohn’s leaks showed that very wealthy Americans got huge tax benefits and avoided rules to get more money. Trump’s tax returns showed that the ex-president paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.

Bezos’s returns showed that he paid no federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011.

Musk’s tax returns showed he paid $455 million in taxes on $1.52 billion in income from 2014 to 2018.

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On Friday, a letter by Barbara Jones, a former federal judge who is the special monitor for the fraud case, suggested that Trump may have committed huge tax fraud by saying he owed more than $48 million to one of his companies — but the loan was fake.