Trump Freaks Out After Rachel Maddow Shows His Tax Returns To The Country
By Sean Colarossi on Tue, Mar 14th, 2017 at 10:22 pm
Trump said Rachel Maddow's reporting on Tuesday night was "totally illegal."
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, with the help of Daily Beast contributor David Cay Johnston, revealed a portion of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns on Tuesday night – and the White House is freaking out about it. In a statement released a short time ago, the White House said this:
First of all, with or without this exclusive reporting by Maddow, her ratings would have been just fine. As Jason Easley wrote yesterday, her audience is rapidly growing and even beat Fox News last week among key viewers.
What was particularly striking, though, is that the White House accused Maddow of breaking the law by revealing this portion of Trump’s tax documents. Or, as they called her reporting, “totally illegal.”
But as Maddow pointed out during Tuesday’s program, sharing the returns – which were lawfully obtained – is part of a journalist’s first amendment rights, though we probably shouldn’t expect Trump to know anything about those since he has spent nearly every day of his first two months in office either attacking the press or avoiding them.
“For the record, the first amendment gives us the right to publish this return. It is not illegally published, nor are we fake,” Maddow said.
It’s clear that the MSNBC star hit a nerve in the Trump White House by revealing something that no one in the media has yet been able to – his tax returns, even if it was just a portion.
Perhaps the president is just angry because he’s afraid this is only the beginning of what could be more leaks into his financial background, which could show more than Trump’s earnings – but where the money came from.
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