White House: Trump made $150 million, paid $38M in taxes in ’05
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
The White House said Tuesday that President Donald Trump made more than $150 million in income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year.
The acknowledgement came shortly before MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported on two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax forms on her Tuesday night show.
The records were obtained by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who said he received the document unsolicited in the mail.
The documents have become highly sought-after because Trump refused to release his returns during the campaign, breaking a decades-long tradition. He claimed he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service and said his attorneys had advised against it – though experts and IRS officials said such audits don’t bar taxpayers from releasing their returns.
The White House pushed back pre-emptively Tuesday night, saying that publishing those returns would be illegal.
“You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago,” the White House said in a statement.
The unauthorized release or publishing of federal tax returns is a criminal offense, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to five years in jail. But Maddow argued that MSNBC was exercising its First Amendment right to publish information in the public interest.
Based on the documents obtained by Johnston, Trump paid $36.5 million in taxes on $153 million in income, for an effective tax rate of around 24 percent. That percentage is higher than the roughly 10 percent the average American pays each year – but below the 27.4 percent that taxpayers earning 1 million dollars a year average, according to data from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Trump’s tax returns spotlight the role of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was established nearly five decades ago.