The bombshell story on Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns that show a near-billion dollar operational loss appeared out of the blue one day last month to a New York Times reporter.
In a report posted Sunday morning, New York Times reporter Susanne Craig said she checked her mailbox — not email, her actual physical work mailbox — on Sept. 23 and found a manila envelope with Trump Tower marked as the return address.
Craig said her heart “skipped a beat” because she had been hunting for Trump’s tax returns for months.
“I have written extensively about Mr. Trump’s finances, but, like almost every other reporter, I was eager to see his actual returns,” Craig wrote Sunday. “The envelope looked legitimate. I opened it, anxiously, and was astonished. Inside were what appeared to be pages from Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax records, containing detailed figures that revealed his tax strategies.”
Craig detailed a two-week process of investigating the discovery, poring over the documents for signs of forgery but found that they were accurate. The reporters then came up with a picture of what Trump’s business looked like in 1995 to see if the record reflected a massive $916 million loss that year.
She said the organization hired tax experts to explain the documents to them. They were thrown off by two digits in the total operational loss being in a different font than the rest of the number.
The process also included sending a colleague to Florida to track down Trump’s former accountant. The accountant, Jack Mitnick, confirmed the authenticity of the documents.
“Mr. Mitnick not only said that the records appeared to be authentic, he also solved the mystery of the digits that did not line up,” she wrote. “It turned out that the tax preparation software he had used did not allow him to enter a loss of nine figures. So, he recalled, he had to manually enter the first two digits, using an IBM Selectric typewriter.”
On Saturday, the Times brought their findings to the Trump campaign for a response. The campaign issued them a statement but did not deny the reports, instead threatening legal action.
“We felt confident that our reporting was correct,” Craig wrote.
