President Donald Trump blasted as “fake news” Rachel Maddow’s scoop last night in which she got her hands on two pages of Trump’s IRS 1040 form from 2005.

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Rachel Maddow: Donald Trump Reported $150M In Income In 2005 And Paid $38M In Taxes

Trump wasn’t the only critic of the broadcast, which was panned by some viewers and TV-industry navel lint gazers as being a whole lot of buildup for very little bang.

This morning Trump tweeted:  "Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!"

 

Except the White House had confirmed the authenticity of the document to Maddow, who devoted her entire Tuesday telecast to the document. The two pages show Trump wrote off more than $100 million in business losses to reduce his federal taxes in 2005.  They also show Trump paid $36.5 million in federal income taxes on reported income of $152M, which, Maddow and reporter David Cay Johnston noted, is an effective tax rate of 24%.

Johnston, the Pulitzer-prize winning former New York Times reporter, who authored the book The Making Of Donald Trump, had received the tax filing, and also posted the doc on his website.

 
 

In the program, Johnston told Maddow he got the pages “over the transom” at his house from an unknown person, adding that, for all he knew, Trump sent them.

Donald Trump Jr. also seemed to have confirmed the authenticity of the documents his father branded “fake”:

 
 

CNN was, in fact, among the media outlets dinging Maddow for Tuesday night’s “overhyped” broadcast, complaining she “teed up a major scoop…only to end up disappointing many in the political-media establishment”:

 

Trump fans, on the other hand, were delighted with Maddow’s MSNBC reveal:

 

That includes FNC’s primetime opinion-ater Sean Hannity who opened his Tuesday 10 PM program talking about Maddow’s 9 PM show, describing her as being among the “Trump-hating hosts over at NBC News” and that night’s The Rachel Maddow Show part of the “corporate jihad being waged by NBC News” against Trump:

http://deadline.com/2017/03/donald-trump-rachel-maddow-tax-return-reveal-fake-news-1202043692/