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Donald Trump’s private legal team is weighing a case against MSNBC and reporter David Johnston for leaking his 2005 tax forms on television this week. As reported earlier Rachel Maddow stepped on a rake earlier this week by releasing Trump’s 1040 tax return form from 2005. Rachel’s attempted hit piece enlightened the country that President Trump paid millions in taxes; he paid a higher tax rate than Socialists Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. The Hill, which is no friend of President Trump, reported last night that what Rachel did may be illegal – “Disclosing a taxpayer’s information without consent IS...

Wait. Look at that closer. What does it say on the second page there? “Client copy”? Yes. Client copy. So. Either Donald Trump leaked this himself, or someone with a “client copy” did. Given that there appears to be nothing embarrassing about the return whatsoever, and the world is laughing at Maddow, my money’s on Trump being the leaker. It’s probably the most favorable return for his narrative in existence. So: he leaks it, hoping this will end the controversy for good — and change the subject from all this CBO/TrumpCare talk.

Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!

It didn’t take long for MSNBC and Rachel Maddow to go from hero to goat last night. Now some want to move them from goat to … victim? After spending all day hyping an exclusive on Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns but delivering a prime-time “total nothingburger,” as Chris Cillizza put it at the Washington Post, some are speculating that Trump set up Maddow by leaking the tax returns himself: Clearly the source of the "leaked" return is Trump himself. 10-20 missing pages w/ key info. This is to DISTRACT us from Russia, health care — Michael Moore (@MMFlint) March...

President Trump may have pulled the most epic political trolling since, well since the last time he did something like this to a political opponent. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was set to release a big scoop about Trump’s taxes Tuesday, when the White House went and released them right before her show began. Here was the announcement of the scoop that set the political world aflutter from Rachel Maddow’s Twitter account: (TWEET-AT-LINK) She later added the clarification explaining what she had in her possession, writing, “What we’ve got is from 2005… the President’s 1040 form… details to come tonight 9PM ET,...

At 7:36 pm Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow tweeted “BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC. (Seriously),” sending the internet into a frenzy of theorizing. Did Maddow have Donald Trump’s tax returns or just one of the Trumps’ tax returns? Could this be it, the tax return that would bring down the Donald? If this was it, why wasn't MSNBC cutting into its programming, instead of running a countdown clock to Maddow’s show? By 8:24, Maddow was tweeting that the tax return in question was Donald Trump’s 1040 from 2005. By 8:30, still half an hour before Maddow...

While Rachel Maddow drones on with the coherence of Janet Yellen, losing thousands of viewers by the minute, the MSNBC anchor was promptly scooped not only by the White House which revealed her "secret" one hour in advance, but also by the Daily Beast which reported that its contributor David Cay Johnston had obtained the first two pages of TrumpÂ’s 2005 federal income tax return, allegedly receiving them in the mail, and posted his "analysts" on his website, DCReport.org. According to the documents, Trump and his wife Melania paid $38 million in total income tax, consisting of $5.3 million...

26 U.S. Code § 7213 - Unauthorized disclosure of information   (a) Returns and return information   (3) Other persons   It shall be unlawful for any person to whom any return or return information (as defined in section 6103(b)) is disclosed in a manner unauthorized by this title thereafter willfully to print or publish in any manner not provided by law any such return or return information. Any violation of this paragraph shall be a felony punishable by a fine in any amount not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both, together with...