Trump blasts release of 2005 tax form, reporter’s account
President Donald Trump earned US$153 million and paid $36.5 million in income taxes in 2005, paying a roughly 25 per cent effective tax rate thanks to a tax he has since sought to eliminate, according to newly disclosed tax documents.
The pages from Trump’s federal tax return show the real estate mogul also reported a business loss of $103 million that year, although the documents don’t provide detail. The forms show that Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24.5 per cent, a figure well above the roughly 10 per cent the average American taxpayer forks over each year, but below the 27.4 per cent that taxpayers earning one million dollars a year average were paying at the time, according to data from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
The tax form was obtained by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who runs the website DCReport.org, and reported on MSNBC’s “The
Rachel Maddow Show.” Johnston, who has long reported on tax issues, said he received the documents in the mail, unsolicited.
Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to cast doubt on Johnston’s account.
“Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns?
@NBCNews FAKE NEWS!”
Johnston, speaking to ABC’s “Good Morning America” Wednesday, said it’s entirely possible he received the returns from Trump himself or someone close to him, saying, “Donald has a long history of leaking things about himself.”
He noted that the real question remains the sources of Trump’s income.