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Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) speaks alongside Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and members of Patriotic Millionaires during a press conference on legislation to increase taxation on the wealthy, April 18, 2023, outside the U.S. Capitol.
Last month, President Biden made history by granting clemency to nearly 1,500 Americans. But before his presidency ends, there’s one very important person whom Biden should add to that list: Charles Littlejohn.
Littlejohn is a former IRS contractor who was sentenced to prison in January of last year for leaking the income tax records of thousands of the country’s wealthiest individuals to the media. At his sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes justified her decision to award Littlejohn the statutory maximum of five years—six times the guideline sentence—because, in her belief, his crime constituted a bigger threat to democracy than the January 6th Capitol Riot.
So what, you may ask, did America find out from Littlejohn’s leaks that was apparently worse than an actual physical assault on the seat of our nation’s government that resulted in the deaths of several police officers and wounds to 140 of them, and was intended to overturn the 2020 presidential election?
Well, that billionaires and millionaires like me are gaming the tax system.
The first bombshell to drop thanks to Littlejohn came in September 2020 from The New York Times. Through that story, Americans learned that Donald Trump had paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and that in no fewer than 10 of the previous 15 years, he had paid no income tax at all. Trump did hint at this during a 2016 presidential debate—when Hillary Clinton accused him of not paying federal income tax, he replied, “That makes me smart”—but America would have to wait another four years to get the full picture of his tax avoidance.
ProPublica followed the Times by revealing even greater blockbusters nine months later. They analyzed the tax records provided by Littlejohn of 25 of the wealthiest people in America. Between 2014 and 2018, they found that those 25 had a combined income of over $401 billion, yet they paid just 3.4 percent of it in income taxes. Moreover, Donald Trump was far from the only billionaire who managed to completely dodge income tax in some years, as ProPublica found that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros had all done the same in recent years.
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Ex-IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, right, who leaked former President Trump’s tax returns, appears with attorney Lisa Manning after his sentencing, January 29, 2024.
It wasn’t exactly a secret that America’s wealthiest didn’t pay a lot in taxes before Littlejohn’s leaks. People already knew that the tax code is so convoluted and irrational that it practically constitutes an invitation for the wealthy to use every trick up their sleeves to avoid supporting the government that has enabled their financial success. But to understand the full scale of the problem, Americans needed cold, hard numbers attached to some big and familiar names. They might not have seen that, in 2018, the top 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower effective overall tax rate than the bottom 50 percent of the country, as UC Berkeley professors Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez documented in The Triumph of Injustice. But I bet that they’d have a hard time forgetting that Elon Musk—the king of all things “X” himself—paid $0 in federal income taxes that year, and they’d have Charles Littlejohn to thank for knowing that.
Yes, Littlejohn broke the law by revealing tax information without taxpayers’ consent, but ultimately, he also did the nation a great service by spotlighting the urgent need for tax reform in a country being ripped apart by extreme and rising inequality.
You might not think that a rich person like me, and particularly one from one of the most famous families in the world, would care about the gap between the rich and the poor, except out of some sort of benevolence or sympathy. But that’s not the case. If large swaths of our country openly laud the suspected murderer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, rich people like me have serious problems to worry about. Without any kind of meaningful action to reduce inequality, I am genuinely afraid that the U.S will start to look like apartheid South Africa—and that didn’t end very well for the rich people. To have any hope of fixing the problem, lawmakers must start making millionaires and billionaires pay their rightful share in taxes.
For these reasons, President Biden should commute Littlejohn’s sentence to time served. There is no escaping that Littlejohn committed a crime, but his sentence was unduly harsh: six times the recommended sentence, and far longer than what the vast majority of January 6th insurrectionists got—indeed, what wealthy criminal tax evaders tend to get. Biden should recognize this disparity, and the service that Littlejohn did for his fellow Americans, by granting him clemency.
By revealing the full scope of tax avoidance by the ultra-rich, Charles Littlejohn put the greater good of the country above his own well-being. His actions arose from his now well-documented belief that everyday Americans are being taken advantage of by the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. Justice would be served if President Biden used his last days in office to right this obvious wrong and commute Charles Littlejohn’s sentence.
