A judge grilled a Department of Justice prosecutor on Monday over why the government charged Charles Littlejohn with just one count of unauthorized disclosure of taxes after Littlejohn admitted to leaking the private information of more than a thousand taxpayers to the media in 2020.

“The fact that he is facing one felony count, I have no words for,” Judge Ana Reyes said during Littlejohn’s sentencing hearing.

Littlejohn, a former Internal Revenue Service contractor, was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for the single charge. The sentence was the maximum allowable penalty, and the DOJ had urged the judge to impose it.

Littlejohn admitted to prosecutors last fall that he carried out a plot that involved carefully working around IRS protocols to access and disclose former President Donald Trump’s returns and “over a thousand” returns of other wealthy people, according to court filings. Littlejohn said he then leaked the returns to the New York Times and ProPublica.

The government has said Littlejohn disclosed more than 8,000 annual income tax returns beginning in 2020.

“It cannot be open season on our elected officials. It just can’t be,” Reyes said.

Reyes said targeting a sitting president was an attack on democracy that “engenders the same fear that Jan. 6 does.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), whose taxes were among those Littlejohn leaked, also appeared at the hearing to give a victim impact statement.

Scott said Littlejohn’s agreement with the DOJ “should be called the plea deal of the century.”

“He will be punished for just one violation and not thousands,” Scott lamented, adding that it “makes no sense.”

The judge’s pressure on the DOJ prosecutor came as she pushed the prosecutor to reconcile why the recommended sentence for the single charge should deviate so far outside standard sentencing guidelines, which a probation office calculated would typically put him at about 18 months in prison.

The prosecutor explained that Littlejohn had committed “one of the most serious crimes in the IRS’s history.”

He said the five-year sentence would be one that “communicates to the public that individuals who weaponize their privileged access to private data … will face grave and serious consequences.”

Reyes countered that Littlejohn had no criminal past and cooperated with the government, factors she said she also has an obligation to consider.

Reyes asked that if she did not weigh these, “doesn’t that also send a message?”

As she announced her sentence, Reyes concluded that Littlejohn’s crime outweighed those other considerations.

Many people will consider Littlejohn a hero when he walks out of the courtroom, Reyes said, noting, “I just don’t want you for a moment thinking I will be one of them.”

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Littlejohn, for his part, gave a brief statement to the court, saying he anticipated that there would likely be legal consequences for his actions. He said, however, that he felt an obligation to reveal the tax information out of concern that the public was not aware that wealthy people, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett, were, in his view, not paying their fair share in income taxes.

“I believe then as I do now that we as a country make the best decisions when we are all properly informed,” he said, but he added that he would seek “lawful ways to contribute” to society in the future.