So, who mailed Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return to the award-winning proprietor of the obscure DCReport.org from somewhere in Westchester, N.Y.? David Cay Johnston, the 2001 Pulitzer winner himself, says he doesn’t know.
President Trump says he doesn’t know either, he reportedly said in his interview with Tucker Carlson that will run tonight.
“I have no idea where they got it but it’s illegal and they’re not supposed to have it and it’s not supposed to be leaked and it’s certainly not an embarrassing tax return at all, but it’s an illegal thing they’ve been doing it, they’ve done it before and I think it’s a disgrace,” Trump said.
On Twitter, Trump tried even to cast doubt on the idea that Johnston found it in his mailbox at all:
Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, “went to his mailbox” and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Now, if Trump actually is the source of these documents, then what he said in today’s interview would be a very bold lie.
And not to say Trump is unaccustomed to making things up, but are we just supposed to assume this conspiracy theory is true? Johnston has speculated that Trump sent them himself — speculation which, if true, would clear up any potential legal issues about its publication. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has claimed it’s “painfully obvious” Trump did it.
I don’t think it’s “painfully obvious.” I think it’s not impossible and certainly the document’s release helped Trump more than it hurt him. But a Trump self-leak sounds more like a kooky InfoWars idea at the moment, and not something I’d want to run around in public stating as if it were a known fact or even something of great likelihood until I saw some evidence to that effect.
The standards of evidence for believing Trump conspiracy theories seem to be getting awfully low nowadays.
