Five signs that Donald Trump leaked his own 2005 tax returns as a Trump-Russia diversion
Someone anonymously mailed the first two pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns to longtime Trump rival David Cay Johnston, who promptly handed them over to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow last night, and for a moment we thought we were off to the races. But by the end of the hour it was clear that this isolated bit of Trump’s tax returns contained little. In fact here are five concrete reasons to believe that Trump himself strategically leaked them last night as a diversion:
1) These returns are from 2005, back when Donald Trump was still financially prospering. They show him with a decent income and nothing to suggest anything troublesome or embarrassing. General consensus is he likely went broke during the 2008 crash and was forced to begin borrowing Russian money laundered through Deutsche Bank shortly thereafter. How convenient, the,n that his one year of leaked returns happened to have been from before that. Also, any leaker who would have had access to the first two pages would have also had access to the entire return, and if someone leaked this to try to hurt him, the entire document would have been included. As it stands, the names of Trump’s businesses and business associates are conveniently removed.
2) Trump never signed the leaked document in question. In the signature box it’s stamped “client copy.” So this leak didn’t come from anyone in the government. Even if Trump was forced to provide his 2005 tax return in a lawsuit, his attorney likely would have provided his own copy, not Trump’s unsigned client copy. The only people who could have realistically had access to the copy that leaked last night were Donald and Melania. And if Melania were somehow trying to harm him, this is not the year or the pages she would have leaked.
3) Rachel Maddow reported on-air that when she provided the two leaked pages to the White House for comment before going on air, it swiftly confirmed the authenticity. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to believe that Trump and the White House didn’t already know what had been leaked. Trumps tax returns are such a sensitive subject for him that he was willing to risk losing the election just so he wouldn’t have to release the most embarrassing portions of them. Yet when this particular return leaked, the White House – despite lying constantly and ludicrously about anything it doesn’t want to acknowledge – immediately admitted to Maddow that it was real without needing time for digestion or internal debate.
4) In fact the White House released a statement which, while clearly written by Donald Trump himself based on the signature hyperbolic verbiage, had everything spelled correctly. Trump is an extremely poor phonetic speller, as evidenced by his consistent mistakes on Twitter. So not only did Trump have time to write a statement full of carefully calculated faux-outrage at the media, his staff had time to fix his errors. And this all happened nearly instantly. Also, Trump released an official statement, which he never does, instead of letting loose on Twitter, which he always does when he’s angrily caught off guard.
5) Not a single person in the Trump administration or Trump family seemed remotely caught off guard by a development which should have been stunning. In fact Donald Trump Junior, whose Twitter posts are generally slow on the uptake, managed to confidently declare “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is & that he paid $40mm in taxes!” shortly after the returns were leaked. Does this sound like he had just been caught off guard by a shocking and malicious leak of his father’s tax returns? It sounds like even he knew in advance.
This evidence all adds up to the question of why Donald Trump would have strategically leaked his own 2005 tax returns at this time. For one thing, some Americans will now mistakenly assume that his more recent returns are as clean as the first two pages of this ancient return. And other big stories yesterday, such as his would-be deputy National Security Adviser Monica Crowley registering as a foreign agent, were buried. Perhaps most relevantly, it may cut into today’s news cycle in which James Comey is expected to reveal details of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. This leak feels like an intentional distraction at a time when a sinking Trump needed one. Contribute to Palmer Report
