Trump Slams Maddow Report As “Fake News”

The New York Daily News reports:

Take a wild guess at how President Trump reacted to the latest leak of his tax returns. Trump awoke early Wednesday morning to dismiss MSNBC’s scoop from the previous night as “fake news,” even though the White House confirmed the authenticity of the 2005 tax forms released by an anonymous source.

Seven minutes later, he moved on to tweeting about Snoop Dogg. The reporter “who nobody ever heard of” is David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporting expert who has covered Trump for decades and authored a biography about him last year, “The Making of Donald Trump.”

The forms revealed that Trump made more than $150 million and paid $38 million in federal income tax. But Trump and his wife Melania paid only about $5 million — or less than 4% of the total income. The rest came from the alternative minimum tax, a second kind of tax for wealthy Americans — and one Trump has said he wants to eliminate.

The White House inaccurately accused MSNBC and Johnston violating the law and stealing the tax returns, neither of which appear to be true. But it did not dispute the authenticity of the leaked pages.