The Whistleblower Who Leaked Trump’s Taxes Is About to Go to Prison. Biden Should Pardon Him Now.
There’s a strong moral case for President Joe Biden to pardon Charles Littlejohn, the former IRS contractor who was recently sentenced to five years in prison for leaking the tax records of Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other billionaire tax cheats.
Over the past several years, Littlejohn’s whistleblowing enabled revelatory reporting by the New York Times and ProPublica on tax avoidance by the super-rich. Ideally, tax returns in the United States would be readily available to the public, as they are in multiple Nordic countries—a policy choice that has contributed to far less tax evasion and inequality.
But in the U.S., the hoarding of billions of dollars (trillions, if you count unrealized capital gains) by plutocrats—who have collectively lobbied for lower tax rates and deployed sophisticated techniques to ensure that they end up paying less than teachers and nurses—has been willfully concealed.
It is only thanks to Littlejohn that we now know exactly how little the wealthiest people in the U.S. pay in taxes—and how much their squirreling away much-needed revenue through habitual tax avoidance is harming their fellow Americans. That’s a far more serious crime than the one committed by Littlejohn, who risked his freedom to expose a key facet of the rampant inequality subverting our democracy.
Biden should pardon Littlejohn because it would be wrong to let the 38-year-old languish behind bars for revealing fraudulent, and in some cases illegal, behavior that was never prosecuted. But also because it’s good politics.
AdvertisementIf Biden were to pardon the IRS whistleblower, Trump would almost certainly cry foul. That would be a good thing, or at least nothing to shy away from, as it would allow Biden to make tax fairness a defining issue in this year’s presidential race.
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