Central ND News

More than 405,000 U.S. taxpayers, including President Donald Trump, had their tax records illegally leaked by an IRS contractor to news organizations ProPublica and The New York Times.

That’s according to a Feb. 25 letter sent by IRS Acting Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell to U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

ProPublica is a partner with the North Dakota Monitor which, in turn, publishes news articles in the Bismarck Tribune. 

O’Donnell’s letter to Jordan said that 405,427 taxpayers—including individuals and businesses—had their tax information unlawfully accessed and leaked by Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, between 2018 and 2020. 

Littlejohn pleaded guilty to unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and was sentenced to five years in prison in January 2024.

Among the leaked tax records were those of President Trump, which were leaked to the The New York Times. The Times then published a report on September 28, 2020, detailing two decades of Trump’s tax returns.

Littlejohn later leaked a broader set of IRS data, including Trump’s records, to ProPublica, which used it for its June 2021 “Secret IRS Files” series.

O’Donnell said the IRS “has mailed notifications to 405,427 taxpayers whose returns and/or return information was disclosed by Mr. Littlejohn.”

As of publication time, neither ProPublica nor The New York Times has faced public legal action over publishing the illegally-leaked tax records.

Founded in 2007, ProPublica “is the creation of Herbert M. and Marion O. Sandler,” reported The New York Times. The Sandlers are a N.C. couple who Time magazine ranked among “25 people to blame from the (2008) financial crisis.” They originally committed $10 million a year to ProPublica, reported the Times.

Eighty-four percent of ProPublica’s readers identify as liberal, according to a 2018 ProPublica survey of its own readers, and 33 percent of the outlet’s readers say the group’s reporting is liberal. 

North Dakota Monitor announced in July 2024 that it was joining ProPublica’s “Local Reporting Network.” 

The Monitor is part of the “States Newsroom” network, a nonprofit that operates a network of state-focused news outlets across the United States. States Newsroom describes itself as a “progressive political journalism startup,” according to a January 2020 LinkedIn job posting. 

States Newsroom was “launched with the backing of the Hopewell Fund, another liberal dark-money group,” reported “NewsGuard” correspondent Gabby Deutch in a Feb. 2020 Washington Post piece. 

North Dakota Monitor's current editor-in-chief, Amy Dalrymple, was previously the editor of the Bismarck Tribune, which has published more than twenty articles with North Dakota Monitor bylines between Feb. 1 and Feb. 26, 2025.

The Tribune also has published at least two articles with ProPublica bylines thus far in 2025.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee posted on X that O’Donnell’s letter to the committee about the illegal leak to ProPublica “confirms the Committee’s suspicion and recent reports that show the scope of the leak was much broader than what the Biden Administration’s IRS initially led the public to believe.”

“This is a MASSIVE scandal,” said the committee.