David Cay Johnston, the journalist who first got President Trump’s year 2005 tax return, accused the White House of unfairly distributing his find to other reporters this week.
In a radio interview Thursday, Johnston said the White House didn’t play by journalistic rules when it put out a combative statement to other media outlets to undercut Johnston’s reporting, rather than talking directly with him.
“Instead, they — first of all, and this is to anybody in the news business totally unethical — they took my exclusive story before it went up at DC Report, which is my website, DC Report,” he said on SiriusXM. “They went and gave it to other reporters, that’s just — you don’t do that. I’ve never had a company or a White House all the way back to Nixon do anything within a million miles of that and then they acknowledged the [tax] document but they had this nasty statement that they put out. And they never officially got back to me. They put out a statement, which tells you this really got under Donald Trump’s skin.”
Johnston broke his story Tuesday on MSNBC. But the news was first teased by the show’s host, Rachel Maddow, on Twitter nearly an hour before her program went live.
That gave time for the White House to put out a statement ahead of the show that revealed details of the report. The White House also said, “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.”
In doing so, the White House took some steam out of the would-be exclusive, irking Johnston, though there is no rule anywhere that says government officials can’t go on the offense when faced with potentially harmful news coverage.
“I mean, Donald Trump is a very immature personality and if somebody else had sent [questions to the White House over the tax documents], he may have reacted differently. Perhaps it’s because of me. In fact, I think it’s because of me that he responded, Joe, in this way of attacking and making these false claims.”
