Back on March 14, Rachel Maddow announced on twitter that she had a very big story for that night’s show. Trump taxes. As expected, the internet freaked out beforehand and then subsequently freakout afterwards when it was aired that only the first two pages of the 1040 were released.
The forms were obtained by Rachel’s guest that night, David Cay Johnston — Journalist, tax expert, and author of The Making of Donald Trump — who stated that he found the documents in his mailbox one day.
The question that everyone had was “where did these come from?” and “who provided the leak?” Many speculated that the leak came from Trump himself to make himself look good since they showed that he actually paid a decent amount of taxes (~$38M) that year on a pretty sizable income (~$150M) at a tax rate of 24%, which is low for a “billionaire” but much higher than the previous reporting of effectively 0%. In fact, here is what Johnston himself had to say about it:
And, by the way, let me point out, it`s entirely possible that Donald sent this to me. Donald Trump has over the years leaked all sorts of things. The very sleazy girl-on-girl pictures of the first lady in the “New York Post” may have come from Donald. The front pages of the state tax returns that we had that were sent to the “New York Times” and the “New York Daily News” last fall may have come from Donald.
Donald has a long history of leaking material about himself when he thinks it`s in his interests.
At the time, many theories were put out as to how and why these came about. One interesting theory was posited by hacktivist th3j35t3r who pointed out that this was the year that Melania and Donald married and she gained her citizenship.
Donald Trump married Melania Knaus in 2005. She had been a permanent resident since 2001. She became a US citizen in 2006. Part of the US naturalization checklist REQUIRES either the last 5 years tax returns if you are single OR the last 3 years tax returns if you are married to a US citizen, which would be in Melania’s case means she needed to provide:
- For 2003 her single filing…
- For 2004 her single filing…
- For 2005 her joint filing with Donald Trump.
Melania’s citizenship depended on a squeaky clean joint tax filing in 2005.
Read that again – Melania’s citizenship depended on a squeaky clean joint tax filing in 2005.
Hence the actual payment of taxes for that year.
That brings us to yesterday. At the WH press briefing, the topic of Trumps taxes came up again and again with Spicer essentially letting the world know that the taxes will never be released to the public. Big shock. But then he justified it with one line that has not been covered much at all:
MR. SPICER: Hold on. And then so -- and the one time that it was done I think the people understand how successful the President has been and how much he’s paid in taxes. But we’re under the same audit that existed, and so nothing has changed.
The question was about Trump releasing his tax returns and this response basically answers the question of where Johnston’s paperwork came from. Once again, we cannot trust anything from this White House.