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DC Daily: Fallout from release of President Trump's tax returns

Posted at 8:08 AM, Mar 15, 2017
and last updated 2017-03-15 14:54:41-04

President Donald Trump is close to rounding out his Cabinet as congressional leaders continue to debate a bill that would replace Obamacare.

What's happening in the political world:

Trump's morning tweet(s):

The president went on Twitter Wednesday morning with the following thoughts:

Journalist: Questions remain despite Trump tax return reveal
-- (AP) The journalist who received a copy of a portion of President Donald Trump's 2005 tax returns says Trump doesn't want the American people to know who "he's beholden to."

In an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, journalist David Cay Johnston says it's possible that either Trump or someone close to him sent him two pages of Trump's tax return.

Johnston, who says he received the documents by mail, unsolicited, revealed his findings Tuesday on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."

He says it's possible that he only received two pages of the returns because "somebody isn't going to take the time to copy the entire tax form."

But he notes that the documents still leave many questions unanswered, including "who he's beholden to and what the sources of his income are."


President slams rapper over music video
-- A new music video that features rapper Snoop Dogg pointing a gun at a clown dressed as President Trump has raised many eyebrows and elicited a response from the president via Twitter.

Sen. Marco Rubio disagreed with Snoop's actions in the video and told TMZ: "I think people can disagree on policy, but we've got to be careful about that kind of thing because the wrong person sees that and gets the wrong idea and you could have a real problem."


Trump's 2005 tax returns released
-- The White House confirmed that President Donald Trump earned $153 million and paid $36.5 million in income taxes in 2005 -- a revelation that was made prior to a television report promising a release of his tax returns.

The pages from Trump's federal tax return show the then-real estate mogul also reported a business loss of $103 million that year, although the documents don't provide detail. The forms show that Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24.5 percent, a figure well above the roughly 10 percent the average American taxpayer forks over 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.

The forms were obtained by journalist David Cay Johnston, who runs a website called DCReport.org, and reported on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show." Johnston, who has long reported on tax issues, said he received the documents in the mail, unsolicited.

The White House has not said whether or not the president plans to release his returns while he's in office. More than 1 million people have signed a White House petition urging the president to release them.


Maddow's big reveal that wasn't
-- After all the hype and teases, the supposed scoop that MSNBC's Rachel Maddow promised regarding President Trump's tax returns turned out to be less-than-spectacular in the eyes of many.

Following a lengthy monologue and commercial break, Maddow showed that in 2005 Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes on a reported income of $150 million. By the time Maddow got around to sharing that information, it had already been supplied by the White House and published on The Daily Beast.

Some reaction: