If you solicit a crime, can you hide behind “freedom of the press”?
If I’m a “journalist” and solicit a snuff film, and then receive one and broadcast it, wouldn’t I be complicit in a murder? Would anyone even argue with that?
I think a better analogy would be child pornography. If you were a journalist and someone sent you child pornography and you published it, you would be as guilty as the person who sent it to you, actually probably more.
In this case they solicited someone to send them a stolen copy of the tax return. They encouraged someone to break the law and then they broke the law themselves by publishing the tax return. It is a crime to publish someone’s tax return without their permission just as it is a crime to publish child pornography.
Just because you obtained something as a “journalist” does not give you the right to publish it. The tax laws were supposedly written to mandate privacy. I personally think MadCow and this investigative journalist no one ever heard of before need to spend a few months doing research while behind bars.