A former Internal Revenue Service contractor, who leaked tax information about Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals to news organizations, got his job to intentionally to spread the confidential records, according to Justice Department prosecutors.
Charles Edward Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, pleaded guilty in October to unauthorized disclosure of tax return and return information. U.S. District Judge Ana Reye scheduled sentencing for Jan. 29. Prosecutors recommended Tuesday he receive the maximum sentence of five years in prison.
“After applying to work as an IRS consultant with the intention of accessing and disclosing tax returns, Defendant weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law,” wrote prosecutors Corey Amundson, chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, Jennifer Clarke and Jonathan Jacobson.
Well the obvious question. What system would you have it replaced with?
And this person has now also made it where everyone will ask, “if this person existed in the IRS, how do we know there are not more?” This is how distrust gets sown. This is how the IRS loses more funding. This is exactly how “ruling class” gets even less oversight. This is how these people, you want to go after, get away with it. This person didn’t solve anything, they made it worse.
That person’s is absolutely heading to jail on the 29th. Where’s Trump at the moment? You think you got some sort of win?
They are going to jail and will likely never have the right to vote ever again in their life. I can still vote for a different world than the one we currently live in.
So if you think this “solved” something, then you didn’t understand the problem. I’m just going to tell you, this kind of tit for tat stuff. We won’t survive it. Every hero ultimately turns into a Robespierre. We don’t solve this with a single person, we solve it together, otherwise we don’t solve it period.
Replace it with one where people have a say and not a ruling class?
There’s enough anarchist/communist/leftist literature out there discussing these issues, they’re not new.
And the idea that you can vote your way out of this mess is adorable, naive, but adorable.
You want everyone to vote on every issue? Because outside of that, we’ve already got that system you talk about.
And those systems have flaws in them as well. It’s not like rich and powerful means “Oh no, I cannot learn to exploit a new system!”
See there’s not an “out”, that’s where you’ve got it wrong. There’s never a point where people stop pushing back on rich and powerful. That’s literally the human condition, it’s forever, always, until the heat death of the universe, an uphill. There is no top of the hill. There is no “out”. Democracy is not a spectator sport, it requires all of us to continually and forever until the last of us is gone, fight the indoctrination with education, fight the power grabs with justice, and fight greed with humility.
At no point do we make progress by breaking laws and further showing how irrelevant that sheet of paper we call the Constitution is and rewriting it to be communist or foregoing it to be anarchist do not make it where suddenly human proclivities cease existing. You cannot do off with the evil side of human nature by adopting some magical means to live one’s life and govern one’s society. It is only with an enteral effort or the cessation of humanity itself that it can placed in check.
No you have all of this completely wrong. There is never “out”.
I want everyone to have the ability to vote on every issue if they want too.
You cannot have rich and powerful people under such a system because the means for them to posses such status do not exist.
There is zero biological imperative that rich and powerful people must exist, that’s purely a social construct. Humans are inherently cooperative.
And yes at every point you make progress by breaking laws. What would LGBT rights look like without the Stonewall riots? What would worker rights look like without anarchists kidnapping CEOs and fighting pinkertons, what would black rights look like without a civil war and groups like the black panthers violence.
Our world got to where it is through shedding the blood of tyrants, not asking them nicely.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Disinformation.
There is a finite set of things and a means to obtain significant portions of those finite things.
Humans are complex.
Let me ask you, all that blood shed previously. Did it work? Are we winning right now? You mentioned the US Civil War, ask yourself, did the slaves actually get free? Did the blacks actually get rights? Did the people who started the war face justice?
Also, all that those moments in history where there was shedding of blood. You do understand, if we had that today, you and I are pretty much assured to not make it. You do understand that? If we went to bloodshed, a lot of the people on this forum are highly likely the be part of the dead. You know in the Declaration of Independence there’s a line:
And reason why is because they knew, that overthrowing the government means most people die and the rich and power continue on. You do kind of notice how a lot of the folks who signed that document were also very rich and very powerful people and very not dead at the end of the Revolutionary war?
Which is why I’m curious about you quoting Thomas Jefferson in his letter to John Adam’s son-in-law. For me a real quote is:
Yes, we are undeniably slightly better off than at any other period. Go ask how many women, queers, or PoC would rather go back to the '50s.
Can you not even recognize such a simple reality?
The kind of people who meaningfully distrust the IRS aren’t interested in facts. The kind of people who want to defund the IRS also have a tenuous connection to truth, justice, and good ideas.
In general I agree that we shouldn’t willy-nilly break the laws. But specific beats general in my mind. I don’t think the costs of this will be very high.
Also like how do you feel about jury nullification?
You know what? I’ll give you that. I’m hopeful enough this blows over without much ado. But IDK, I’ve seen smaller mole hills turn mountains.
The thing is, it isn’t binary. It’s a range of folks. And I would rather us not lose ranks. It’s easier to indicate trust in something if there’s not an actual reason to distrust.
Aw man! Complicated. Because you can really start going all kinds of dark places if you start thinking a Judge willingly could hand out bad instructions to the jury. A not guilty is a lot harder to have an appellate review and if you try to fix it that way, do you want to have not guilty become easier to appeal?
Like we could have a big old day about that topic. Wooo. That’s a can and it is marked “Oops all worms”.
Yes, you’ve identified the real crux of the issue. All Americans have great trust and respect for the IRS, and Mr Littlejohn’s actions might erode some fraction of some fraction of that undeserved trust and respect. Oh, the humanity.