Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like the hundreds of others Trump has threatened to sue but never followed through. Fox News reports:
Personal attorneys working for President Trump are weighing possible legal action against the cable news network MSNBC and a private journalist for reporting a portion of the president’s 2005 tax returns, a move the Trump legal staff believes could have violated federal privacy laws, the FOX Business Network has learned.
Trump’s tax returns were published Tuesday by DCReport.org, a website operated by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter. They were simultaneously aired on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Legal experts say any case would be a long-shot given First Amendment protections for journalists and an important Supreme Court precedent that dates back to the famous 1971 “Pentagon Papers” case. Trump would also have to show that the journalists were complicit in stealing his tax returns—which both Johnston and Maddow have denied.
“Trump’s lawyers could try and sue but they will get the crap kicked out of them in court,” said veteran white collar attorney Stanley Arkin. “It’s the First Amendment. What are they going to sue them for? Stealing the returns? Nobody made any money out of it. Nobody was bribed.”
And a related story from Deadline:
Rachel Maddow’s big reveal of Donald Trump’s headline-challenged 2005 tax return attracted 4.13 million viewers Tuesday night – her biggest audience ever. About 1.4M of those viewers who watched her MSNBC program fell into the 25-54 news demographic group. That’s also a record for Maddow’s show.
Her Trump tax reveal nabbed the network’s second-biggest audience ever for MSNBC for a regularly scheduled show, behind only the October 29, 2008 episode of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, which had averaged 4.2 million total viewers. That came six days before the 2008 election that put Barack Obama into the White House.