Federal prosecutors Friday charged a contractor for the IRS, Charles Littlejohn, with stealing the tax returns of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people” and disclosing them to ProPublica. The “nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force” published the stolen information as part of a campaign advocating that rich people be required to pay more taxes.

The law gives prosecutors the power to act not only against the original leaker, but against “any person” who willfully prints or publishes “in any manner” the tax information. Mr. Littlejohn, who is also accused of giving President Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times, faces up to five years in prison, but the Justice Department filed no criminal charges against ProPublica or its personnel. 

If such charges were brought, judges might well rule that the provision of the Internal Revenue Code punishing publication of tax information is an unconstitutional abridgment of the First Amendment freedom of the press (“Congress shall make no law”). That could be a useful clarification. The alternative, leaving the law on the books but having it effectively nullified by prosecutorial discretion, is less satisfactory. 

At least two of the individuals whose tax returns were stolen have publicly expressed dismay over the disclosure. Michael Bloomberg said it raises “real privacy concerns.” Kenneth Griffin sued the IRS over the matter in December 2022, and he has subpoenaed some of the ProPublica reporters. 

In April 2022, Congressman Kevin Brady and Senator Crapo wrote to the Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, noting that “violating confidentiality does great damage to taxpayers’ confidence in the IRS and the tax system.” They described it as “the political weaponization” of tax information.

The context of both the tax-return leaks and the stalker-style photographic pursuit of elderly billionaires beneath the redwoods of the Russian River Valley is the war on “inequality.” 

Can it be an accident that the same day the criminal information against Mr. Littlejohn was filed in court, a new Harvard president, Claudine Gay, was being inaugurated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, bemoaning “rising inequality”? Also that day, Mr. Trump was in California speaking at a Republican Party convention, denouncing the state’s Democratic politicians for creating “soaring income inequality like nobody’s ever seen before.” 

One of the ProPublica articles about the purloined tax returns talked about “a half-century of growing wealth inequality.” It framed proposed tax-increases from Senators Sanders and Warren and President Biden as responses to “growing inequality.”

The prosecutors may be going easy not only because of the legitimate press freedom concerns but because the victims of this crime are an unpopular minority. Persons who succeed in capitalism used to be venerated as entrepreneurial geniuses. Nowadays, somehow, they’ve been redefined, villainized as miscreants who create inequality.

The Senator Sanders-Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez position is that every billionaire is a policy failure. When the end goal is to seize more wealth through taxes to reduce the inequality, then invasion of privacy seems like just some collateral damage along the way, not worth prosecuting.

The Bible suggests a different view of it. It prescribes, in Leviticus 19:15, a single rule of law for the rich and the poor. “You shall not render an unjust judgment: Do not favor the poor or defer to the great; with justice you shall judge your kinsman.”

That language is echoed in the oath of office for federal judges, who declare that  they “do solemnly swear (or affirm)”  that they will “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich…” Somebody might want to get the word to Attorney General Garland.