On Twitter, Trump criticizes reporter who revealed tax return
President Trump on Wednesday slammed the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who revealed part of Mr. Trump’s 2005 tax return a night earlier on prime-time TV.
In a tweet, Mr. Trump said that David Cay Johnston’s claim that he received the documents in his mailbox is “fake news.”
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Johnston, however, is a well-known journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for reporting stories for The New York Times that exposed loopholes and inequities in the tax code. He also has written books on taxes as well as on the president himself, called “The Making of Donald Trump.”
Johnston presented the portion of the president’s 2005 tax return on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” of which he’s a frequent guest. The documents show that Mr. Trump paid $38 million in taxes in 2005, or 25.3 percent of income over $150 million.
Before the show aired, the White House revealed those numbers and released a statement saying, “You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago.”