President Donald Trump's private business organization said it opposes any reduction to the five-year prison sentence of the former IRS contractor who leaked Trump's tax returns and thousands of others, telling the D.C. Circuit the leaker has been shown enough leniency.

The Trump Organization LLC asked the appeals court Wednesday for permission to formally oppose Charles Littlejohn's request for resentencing by a new judge, saying in a proposed amicus brief that the government's decision to charge Littlejohn with only one felony count "materially understated the magnitude of Littlejohn's misconduct."

The five-year maximum sentence allowed by law for the single count was "the only sentence that meaningfully reflected the seriousness of the offense," the organization said.

"Littlejohn already received the principal benefit in this case — a single count with a five-year cap," the organization said. "Any reduction on appeal would stack leniency upon leniency and weaken deterrence for future individuals with insider access who are considering weaponizing confidential taxpayer data."

The organization said Trump, his family and hundreds of their entities were affected by the disclosures, along with nonpolitical employees and more than 400,000 other people or entities. It claimed the unauthorized disclosures damaged business relationships, exposed ordinary Trump Organization employees and led to stories that intentionally distorted the tax information.

The Internal Revenue Service has notified the organization of the illegal inspection of its tax information for more than 400 of its entities, with more notices still being received, according to the filing.

"The institutional stakes are profound," the organization said. "Weaponizing government systems against a sitting president, his namesake company, and hundreds of his employees undermines the public's trust in the federal government and invites future breaches whenever political considerations are at play."

Littlejohn has not taken a position on the organization's request to join the case, according to the filing.

Littlejohn pled guilty in October 2023 to one count of disclosing tax return information without authorization from around 2018 until 2020 while on the job with the IRS as a contractor through Booz Allen Hamilton. Republicans called his plea agreement a "sweetheart deal." Littlejohn admitted to downloading thousands of returns and leaking Trump's info to The New York Times in 2019 and other people's tax data the following year to ProPublica.

Before he was sentenced during a two-hour hearing in January 2024, Littlejohn told the court that he broke the law "out of a deep, moral belief that the American people had a right to know the information" and that he believed "sharing it was the only way to effect change." Littlejohn said he was alarmed that, after taking office in 2017, Trump called media outlets "the enemy of the American people" and declined to release his tax returns to the public.

Meanwhile, Trump's attorney pushed for the maximum sentence of five years, saying Littlejohn leaked the returns just ahead of the 2020 elections and likely cost Trump votes.

Littlejohn's sentencing judge, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, called the leaks an "intolerable attack on our constitutional democracy."

"The judiciary must be an unbreakable bulwark against politically minded actors targeting or threatening elected officials," she said during the hearing.

On appeal, Littlejohn has challenged the judge's statements and asked the court to vacate his sentence and order resentencing by someone else. He accused Judge Reyes of "predetermining" a sentence that was three times as long as the recommended guidelines, which suggested a low-end sentence of 18 months.

Littlejohn pointed to off-the-record meetings the judge held with his attorneys and prosecutors, and he said she improperly considered a letter from lawmakers urging her to give him the maximum five years. She unfairly compared him to the Jan. 6 rioters, he said.

During oral arguments this month, Littlejohn's attorney, assistant public defender Celia Goetzl, called the judge's claim that he had targeted Trump and threatened democracy "exaggerated." Judge Reyes "misunderstood the magnitude of the offense, the nature of the offense and the magnitude of the harm," the attorney said.

However, the appeals judges seemed unlikely to side with Littlejohn, with one of them, U.S. Circuit Judge Justin R. Walker, reading aloud from the sentencing transcript and concluding that Judge Reyes had thought hard about her decision and considered all sides.

"I have to say," Judge Walker said, "I hope I'm never sitting in the chair that your client was, but if I were, I would want a sentencing judge who thought about my case as hard as it sounds like Judge Reyes thought about that case and who approached it with the thoughtfulness that it seemed like she approached it."

The Trump Organization said in the filing Wednesday that Littlejohn's conduct should have been more harshly punished. The organization also highlighted that the U.S. Department of Justice was under the direction of former President Joe Biden's administration when it made the charging decision.

The organization has "a distinct and vital interest" in the appeal's outcome, it argued. A reduced sentence would not only hurt the public's confidence in the justice system but also undermine privacy rights, the organization said.

"A lesser sentence would not only trivialize the profound breach of trust at the heart of this case — it would compound the damage already done to The Trump Organization, its employees, and the integrity of every enterprise that relies on the government to safeguard its most confidential information," according to the organization.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice, Tax Division, declined to comment.

Representatives of the Trump Organization and Littlejohn did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Trump Organization is represented by Jesse R. Binnall of Binnall Law Group.

The government is represented by Edward P. Sullivan, Jonathan E. Jacobson, Matthew R. Galeotti and W. Connor Winn of the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division.

Littlejohn is represented by Tony Axam Jr., Matthew L. Farley, Celia Goetzl and A.J. Kramer of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Columbia.

The case is U.S. v. Littlejohn, case number 24-3019, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.