My name is Bob Lord. I am the Senior Vice President for Tax Policy at the Patriotic Millionaires and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Before my time as a tax justice advocate, I practiced tax law for forty years and also ran for Congress back in 2008.
Today, the Patriotic Millionaires joined forces with the Revolving Door Project to launch a grassroots letter campaign – housed at FreeCharlesLittlejohn.com – to urge President Biden to commute the prison sentence of Charles Littlejohn. For this week’s Closer Look, I want to tell you about Charles Littlejohn, make my case as to why he deserves clemency from the president, and do my best to encourage you to join our cause.
Charles Littlejohn is a former IRS contractor who, in 2019 and 2020, leaked the income tax records of thousands of the country’s wealthiest individuals to The New York Times and ProPublica. In January 2024, US District Judge Ana Reyes sentenced him to five years in prison for his actions, the statutory maximum and fully six times the maximum sentence that guidelines recommended. As of this writing, Littlejohn has been behind bars for eight months.
You might think that, since he received such a harsh sentence, Littlejohn must have done something unspeakably horrible. There’s certainly no question that Judge Reyes thought so. But in my mind, the real horror is not so much what Littlejohn did in stealing and leaking tax records, but rather what those records revealed: the massive scale of tax avoidance by the ultra-rich.
The first bombshell to drop stemming from Littlejohn’s leaks came in September 2020 from the Times. Then, America learned that their then-president (and soon-to-be-president-again), Donald Trump, had paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. And to add insult to injury, in no fewer than 10 of the previous 15 years, he paid no income tax at all, despite receiving over $400 million from his stint on The Apprentice and the various licensing and endorsement deals that he racked up as he became famous. Donald Trump was the first presidential candidate in history to refuse to release his tax returns to the public, and given what we know now from Littlejohn’s leaks and the Times’ reporting, it’s easy, albeit sad, to see why.
The next bombshell dropped in June 2021 from ProPublica. They analyzed the tax records of the 25 wealthiest Americans that Littlejohn provided to their team. Incredibly, they found that, between 2014 and 2018, the collective worth of that group rose $401 billion, yet they paid a true tax rate of just 3.4%. (For reference, in 2022, the average American paid a 14.5% income tax rate.) Warren Buffett, for one, had a true tax rate of 0.1% – while ProPublica did not reveal the proportion in income taxes that his secretary paid, I think it’s safe to assume it was more than that. And apparently, according to ProPublica’s analysis, the president-elect isn’t the only billionaire to completely avoid income tax, as they found that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros have all managed to do the same in recent years.
I’ve been a tax lawyer for forty years. Over the past decade, I’ve been pretty outspoken about the various maneuvers that the rich deploy to avoid tax and the urgent need for reform. I even gave up my practice and decided to work full-time as an advisor to the Patriotic Millionaires to get the word out. But despite my best efforts, I fully recognize that no technical explanation that I could give about any of the myriad tax loopholes that the rich exploit would ever stick in the public conscience the same way that Littlejohn’s leaks did about big names like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos paying $0 in income tax. Charles Littlejohn did more to advance the cause of tax fairness in one swoop than I did in my years of advocacy.
In her sentencing remarks, Judge Ana Reyes claimed that Littlejohn’s actions constituted a greater threat to American democracy than those of the January 6th Capitol insurrectionists. That’s absurd. In no world could Littlejohn be a greater threat to our democratic republic than the rioters who stormed the Capitol and tried to overthrow our government, and it beggars belief that he is serving a longer prison sentence than many of them. The truth is, if lawmakers are inspired by Littlejohn’s leaks to finally take meaningful steps to reform our tax system and rein in extreme wealth, he will have done more to save American democracy than harm it.
Yes, Charles Littlejohn committed a crime. But at the same time, he did the nation a great service by revealing just how little America’s wealthiest pay in taxes. The draconian sentence imposed by Judge Reyes was a travesty. President Biden should commute Littlejohn’s prison sentence to prevent what otherwise would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
With all that said, I hope that I’ve persuaded you to participate in our letter campaign to call on President Biden to use what little time he has left in office to commute Charles Littlejohn’s prison sentence to time served. Yesterday, four of the country’s most esteemed tax law professors – Professors Reuven S. Avi-Yonah of the University of Michigan, David Gamage of the University of Missouri, Goldburn P. Maynard Jr. of Indiana University, and Alex Zhang of Emory University – sent a letter to the president with the same demand. With our new letter campaign, our goal is to add to the chorus and get to the president’s ear about this important cause before it’s too late.
Be sure to check out FreeCharlesLittlejohn.com to learn more and join the fight.