A reporter nobody ever heard of
Someone leaked Trump’s 2005 tax return, minus all the informative attachments, yesterday. I think it was Trump who leaked it, since a hostile party would have included the informative attachments.
President Trump paid $38 million in federal taxes in 2005 on income of $153 million and reported a $105 million write-down in business losses, according to a copy of his tax return first revealed Tuesday night.
Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24 percent and saved millions of dollars in additional taxes by claiming the losses, according to the document, the first two pages of which were obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and first reported by DC Report, a nonprofit news site he runs, and on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
…
The document offers a rare snapshot of Trump’s personal finances, considering he has refused to disclose his tax returns to the public. The White House issued a statement chastising MSNBC for reporting on Trump’s taxes — “totally illegal,” read the statement — but also confirming top-line numbers from the return and defending Trump.
Still, Trump tweeted early Wednesday that the report was “FAKE NEWS” and asked: “Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns?”
That’s so Trump. He’d never heard of the reporter, so he assumes that no one else has either. Pulitzer shmulitzer, am I right?
The newly revealed pages from his 2005 return do not detail his financial ties, but they do seem to disprove the theory that some Democrats advanced in last year’s campaign that Trump avoided paying any federal income taxes during that period.
That’s another reason I think he’s the one who leaked the page. (It’s one page really, one page with two sides.)
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, tweeted, “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is& that he paid $40mm in taxes! #Taxes”
See? He leaked it himself. Another reason to think so: a new pretext for shouting at the press.
How successful – if you measure success only in money, you can reach that conclusion from a tax return.
I consider myself very successful. I did not make millions, or pay millions in taxes, but I have achieved things that Trump could never achieve, nor even understand wanting to achieve.
Hard to believe Trump never heard of David Cay Johnston who wrote a 2016 best selling book on Trump, “The Making of Donald Trump” and back then said he’d known Trump for 28 years.
I don’t know the truth of this, but I have seen it claimed that Trump’s first tweet about the ‘leak’ preceded any reporting of it.
Bahahaha – I heard that on Maddow’s show, bastionofsass, but promptly forgot it.
Holms – what I heard (via Brian Williams on MSNBC I think) is that the White House issued its statement on the leak before the reporting.
They asked the White House to verify it was, in fact, his tax return as part of their pre-live show actual-reporting-not-just-saying-stuff process, so they knew about it before the first Maddow tweet.
I’ll note that that certainly doesn’t preclude their leaking it, it just doesn’t indicate it, either.
Oh right, so they did. I should have taken notes last night.
But anyway – I think it’s Trump because it’s that particular 1040, which doesn’t damage him and does help him, and because it’s only the 1040, and because he has a history of leaking news about himself.
Ooh, one single return from 12 years ago. No ned to look any further, then.
AoS, yeah, as I said to a Trumpster yesterday, crow when we’ve seen every return since 1996. Strangely, that actually shut him up.
Also, isn’t Trump on record as wanting to abolish the alternative minimum tax? If so, that would reduce his effective tax rate to just 4% for that year.
That is surely just coincidence. After all, Trump is about making America GRRREEAAATTTT again, and so he wants to help people who need help. Can he help it he happens to be in the group that is in most need of help to be able to get by from hand to mouth every month? Not like those “lucky duckies” that pay no taxes at all…clearly they are not in need of any help from the government. They’ve got the system rigged in their favor. But those people who pay millions? Clearly an injustice.
/s
That “scoop” was just embarrassing…