I'm old enough to remember when Kellyanne Conway said Americans didn't care about Trump's tax returns and didn't want to see them. Hm. Maddow's announcement has been retweeted 15,000 times in less than 10 minutes. But we'll have to wait and see what Maddow's ratings are like tonight—that's when we'll find out just how little Americans care about Trump's tax returns.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the Oval Office right now. Seriously. And here's hoping "We've got Trump tax returns" means the same thing as "We've got Donald Trump's tax returns." I'll be pissed if they're talking about Tiffany's tax returns.

UPDATE: A text from a friend: "THIS IS THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION OF OUR GENERATION. 'Where were you when Maddow tweeted that she had Trump's tax returns?' OMFG." But... she didn't say they have Trump's tax returns. She said they have "Trump tax returns."

UPDATE 2: Not Tiffany's. Donald's. But they're twelve-year-old Trump tax returns...


UPDATE 3: So... let's watch Maddow together! Donald Trump's 2005 federal tax returns were obtained by investigative journalist David Cay Johnston of DCReport.org. He'll be on soon to talk about how he got his hands on this "federal document," says Maddow. But first... Maddow is going to walk us through the reason why presidential candidates have been releasing their tax returns since Nixon got caught cheating on his taxes, and the bullshit reasons Trump has given for not releasing his tax returns.

Over at the White House... they rushed to release info about Trump's 2005 taxes before Maddow went live:

The White House says President Donald Trump made more than $150 million in income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year. The acknowledgment comes as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says she has obtained part of Trump’s 2005 tax forms. The White House is pushing back preemptively, saying that publishing those returns would be illegal.

They clearly have all of Trump's tax returns over the years at their fingertips. So why not release them? Why not release his tax returns from last year?

Anyway, Rachel is seizing the opportunity to walk us through all the amazing reporting she's been doing on Trump, Russia, Pence, Flynn, oligarchs, flipping mansions to Russian billionaires, online petitions, etc., etc., etc. She reading out the entire indictment.


Here's Johnston. He says the pages he provided to Maddow—two cover pages, essentially, from Trump's 2005 federal tax returns—show us how much Trump made that year but not how he made it. We don't know his "sources of income," says Johnston, and that—his sources of income—is what we really need to know and what we have, as taxpayers and voters and citizens, have a right to know. And we need to know for more recent years than 2005. Because... who does our president work for? Who owns him?


Maddow sums it up and puts the Trump White House on notice: "The story here is that we have obtained this—and that this stuff is obtainable."

Clearly they're hoping the emergence of Trump's 2005 tax returns will shake loose returns from subsequent years. Here's hoping.







Earlier tweets...






The suspense is killing me. I hope it will last.