Man who misused Trump's Social Security number in bid to access tax data enters guilty plea

BATON ROUGE — A Louisiana private investigator pleaded guilty on Monday to misusing President Donald Trump’s Social Security number in repeated attempts to access the president’s federal tax information before his election last year.

Jordan Hamlett, 32, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine following his guilty plea in federal court.

Authorities have said Hamlett failed in his attempts to get Trump’s tax information through a U.S. Department of Education financial aid website.

A court document accompanying Hamlett’s plea agreement says he used Trump’s Social Security number and other personal information to open an online application for federal student aid on Sept. 13, 2016. After obtaining a user-name and password, he tried to use an Internal Revenue Service data retrieval tool to obtain Trump’s tax information, the document says.

Hamlett, a Lafayette resident, was indicted in November 2016. His trial had been scheduled to start this week, but the judge assigned to the case died on Saturday after a brief illness. U.S. District Court Judge John deGravelles, who inherited the case, didn’t immediately schedule Hamlett’s sentencing hearing.

Defense attorney Michael Fiser had argued Hamlett didn’t have any “intent to deceive” and simply tried “out of sheer curiosity” to discover whether Trump’s tax information could be accessed through the government website.

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