Pulitzer-winning reporter found Trump’s tax return in his mailbox
Writer says he doesn’t know who sent it
ROCHESTER, N.Y. It seems unfathomable that a copy of one of President Trump’s income tax returns would suddenly appear in the mailbox of a journalist who lives in a Rochester suburb.
Trump himself apparently could scarcely believe it, tweeting Wednesday morning after his taxes were disclosed on MSNBC, “Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!”
But that is exactly what David Cay Johnston, a former New York
Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his tax policy coverage and recently wrote a best-selling book on Donald Trump’s rise, said happened.
Johnston broke news of the tax return Tuesday on his fledgling website, DCReport.org, and Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show picked up his report that night. Johnston, who regularly makes appearances on television news programs, was a guest.
In a telephone interview from John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, Johnston recalled that he was in Palm Beach on Monday researching a biography on the president when he received a text from his daughter urging him to check his email immediately.
“So I look at my email, and it says, ‘This came in the mail to- day,’ and it’s a PDF she made of the tax returns sent to me,” Johnston said.
“I had two immediate thoughts: The first one was ‘Is it authentic, or is it a trick, and how am I going to authenticate this?’ ” Johnston said. “The second thought was ‘ Who else has this? How much time to do I have to get this out there?’ ” Johnston said he raced to the airport to get home to Brighton, N.Y., and began working on his story in the Palm Beach airport.
The returns were from 2005. Johnston wrote that the two-page Form 1040 offered “no smoking gun, no obvious evasion” on the part of Trump “but clearly some bending of the tax laws almost to the breaking point.”
Trump reportedly earned $153 million that year and paid $36.6 million in federal taxes, a tax rate of 24%, putting him and his wife, Melania, in the same league as a professional couple making about $400,000 a year.
“Or to put it another way, Donald Trump was paid that year like a member of the 0.001%, but he paid taxes like the 99%,” Johnston wrote on his website. “And by at least one measure, he paid like the bottom 50%.”
Johnston launched the website DCReport.org in January, billing it as “a new kind of news operation in the Trump era.”
The tax return arrived in a plain, No. 10 envelope at his home with a postmark from Westchester, N.Y. Johnston said he didn’t know who sent it.