The reporter “who nobody ever heard of” is David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporting expert who has covered Trump for decades and authored a biography about him a year ago, “The Making of Donald Trump”.
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“It is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns”.
Given that every president since Jimmy Carter has agreed to release his Internal Revenue Service returns, the fact out host Rachel Maddow got her hands on Trump’s return from 2005 did certainly merit all the breathless excitement.
More than a million people have signed a White House petition urging Mr Trump to release them. This form describes his TYPES of income not his SOURCES of income. He had said that he would release it when the regular audit is complete.
What did MSNBC report on Tuesday?
Another piece of evidence supporting that theory (or perhaps contradicting it) is that President Trump himself sent out a tweet denouncing the 2005 1040 form as “fake news”.
There’s nothing earth-shattering in the new document, but it does shed some more light on Trump’s finances.
Trump’s biographer David Cay Johnston said he’ll be there, too.
The statement also acknowledged Trump made over $150 million that year, while saying he paid $38 million in income taxes – noting he had a responsibility to his company and family “to pay no more tax than legally required”. This about an hour after she tweeted “We’ve got Trump’s tax returns“.
According to the documents, the billionaire paid £31 million in income taxes on the earnings. “We received [the documents] around the same time. but were unable to track down the preparer or verify the veracity of the documents through other attempts”, a Daily News source told CNNMoney.
Investigations by the New York Times last fall showed that Trump used a enormous loss in 1995 to avoid paying income taxes for numerous years thereafter.
What do we not know?
That was pretty much it. Trump is the first president in some four decades not to show the public his filings. He took a write-down of $103 million which I’m waiting to learn more about.
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The snapshot was broadly favourable to the White House and appeared to back up Trump’s claim that he paid his fair share of taxes. “Welcome to the real estate business”, Trump responded to Politico.
