Yesterday, the first two pages of one of Donald Trump's old tax returns found their way to Rachel Maddow, reporter on MSNBC, and were widely disseminated across the media landscape. The general verdict is "meh". This is most likely just another distraction by Donald Trump and his associates to diminish the relevant news around his business ties and possible vulnerability to foreign interests - possibly even far-reaching allegiances to a foreign power that run deep in his administration.
The tax return is incomplete, it's just the first two pages, so the supplementary information on his creditors and sources of income is missing. The form is from 2005, before the Trump Organization ran into financial trouble around 2008 and started making shady deals with corrupt banks and foreign players suspected of money laundry. The numbers are in no way damaging or embarrassing to Donald Trump - quite the contrary. They merely show that back in 2005, he was still a successful businessman making a $150 million profit and paying a perfectly reasonable amount of income tax. Why anyone would leak this particular document to the press is a mystery.
Or, maybe it isn't such a mystery after all. This could actually be Donald Trump himself leaking an innocuous document of his own choosing to the press. The form is not signed, but says "client copy". This is not a document from the IRS, but Donald Trump's own copy, and only very few people close to him would have access to it. Furthermore, the reaction from the White House was very quick indeed, in the form of a fairly long, well written and correctly spelled official statement. The text contains unmistakable Trump jargon, which indicates that he was involved in writing it, but it was obviously edited, cleaned up and released by someone else. The statement made a point of criticizing the "dishonest press" for being "desperate for ratings" and wrongfully accusing them of "totally illegal" activity, but the White House confirmed the authenticity of the leaked document without any hesitation. Donald Trump Jr also reacted rather too quickly via Twitter in a suspiciously calm and calculated manner, slandering the media and the "Trump haters". Donald Trump himself remained silent, which is highly unusual. We saw no furious Twitter outburst before the official response, which seems carefully premeditated.
All in all, this looks very much like a badly orchestrated and largely ineffective deflection, using a move taken straight out of Donald Trump's playbook from his career as a businessman and celebrity. He used to call journalists under a phony name with a phony voice (which failed to fool anyone) and leak some benign inside information spiced with a few self-aggrandizing lies. This is most likely just another dishonest move from the crooked 45th president to distract reporters from the real issues.
I could say "Nothing to see here. Move along", but Rachel Maddow is no fool. By announcing hours in advance that she was going to show Donald Trump's tax returns, she cried "wolf" before the show, but her scoop failed to impress anyone. She knew that, and it seems unlikely that she would put her reputation at risk for something this small and insignificant. I suspect there is more to come.
