President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the leaking of pages from his 2005 tax returns is “illegal” and a “disgrace.”
“I have no idea where they got it,” Trump told Fox anchor Tucker Carlson in an interview scheduled to air Wednesday night. “They’ve done it before, and I think it’s a disgrace.”
Trump claimed throughout the 2016 campaign that he could not release his tax returns because he was under audit.
The White House nevertheless confirmed the numbers in the partial 2005 document moments before reporter David Cay Johnston revealed the returns on Rachel Maddow’s Tuesday night show on MSNBC.
Trump on Wednesday morning said that Johnston’s account of finding the documents in his mailbox was “FAKE NEWS.”
“Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, ‘went to his mailbox’ and found my tax returns?” he tweeted.
“It’s illegal and you’re not supposed to have it and it’s not supposed to be leaked,” Trump told Carlson. “It’s certainly not an embarrassing tax return at all but it’s an illegal thing.”