Thrilling details behind Trump's shocking tax records leak

When New York Times reporter Susanne Craig checked her mailbox at the newsroom a few days ago, a thin envelope caught her eye. And she almost screamed in surprise when she opened it.

The tax return leak could damage Mr. Trump. (Source: Forbes)

“I thought the content was a rumor,” she told the Washington Post last Sunday. “My reaction was, ‘This can’t be true.’”

The letter, addressed to the Trump Organization as a return address, contained three photocopied pages containing shocking information: Donald Trump’s tax returns, filed in 1995.
This seemingly low-tech beginning sparked one of the most shocking stories of the 2016 US election season. Late last Saturday (October 1), the Times revealed that Mr. Trump had declared a loss of $916 million in 1995 alone. The loss prevented Trump from paying any taxes that year, and allowed him to avoid paying taxes for the next 18 years.

The article is remarkable, helping to fill in a longstanding mystery surrounding Trump’s taxes. After joining the presidential race, Trump refused to release his most recent tax returns, leading his opponent Hillary Clinton to claim he was hiding information that could harm the White House race.

But the Times story itself was a rare event. It was a bombshell based on an unknown source, whose identity was not immediately known. Even the Times did not know who had sent the bombshell letter. It is worth noting that while American reporters often use anonymous sources when quoting sensitive information, they always know who provided the information.

But the story of the Trump tax return leak was quite different. Interestingly, among the four journalists involved in producing the article, in addition to Craig, was David Barstow, an investigative reporter who has won three prestigious Pulitzer Prizes.

While Craig declined to discuss with the Post whether he knew who sent Trump's tax returns, Deputy Editor Matt Purdy was firm: "We don't know the identity of the source."

But who the source was seemed to be the easiest question behind the documents Craig received on September 23. The key challenge was to verify the authenticity of the three pages and understand Trump’s tax strategy in 1995, said Times editor Dean Baquet. He said the documents looked “real,” but he was skeptical.

In its story about the incident, the Times described the three pages as the first pages of three different tax returns: a New York state income tax return, a New Jersey nonresident tax return and a Connecticut nonresident tax return.

One of the pages contained a nine-figure sum that Trump said was his loss, with the first two numbers (9 and 1) typed in a completely different font than the rest, according to reporter Megan Twohey.
This raised the possibility that the tax returns were fake. To verify the information, the Times hired several tax experts to examine them, in addition to consulting publicly available information, such as Mr. Trump’s Social Security number. They said the documents matched the provisions of the federal tax law enacted in 1995.

One of Mr. Trump's tax returns fell into the hands of a New York Times reporter. (Source: zerohedge.com)

The key to the authentication effort was an accountant named Jack Mitnick, who prepared and signed Trump’s 1995 tax return. Barstow tracked Mitnick down in South Florida and, over “coffee and donuts,” as Craig put it, the reporters determined that Mitnick had indeed prepared Trump’s tax returns, including the three pages someone had sent to the Times.

Mitnick also explained why the 9 and 1 were in a different font than the rest of the numbers. He told Barstow that the two numbers had to be manually entered into the tax return because of a data transmission error that kept erasing them.

Based on Mitnick's information and other data gathered by Barstow, Craig, Twohey, and reporter Russ Beuttner, Baquet decided that the story had enough weight and substance to be published.

And this happened even though Trump's lawyer, Mr. Marc E. Kasowitz, sensed the situation and sent a letter threatening to sue the Times if it published documents owned by Mr. Trump without permission.

In an interview with the Post, Baquet expressed no regrets about his decision. He said that running for president was an important activity and that voters needed to have access to the tax return information that Trump had long withheld.

For her part, Craig still doesn’t understand why her trusted source sent her the envelope containing the documents. It’s likely because the source knew she had experience covering Wall Street, having spent a decade at the Wall Street Journal and the Times.

It may also be because she has been relentlessly reporting on Trump’s business career in the Times for the past nine months, including an investigation this summer that found Trump’s businesses had more than twice the debt he had disclosed.

In any case, Craig said she was glad the package arrived. “It was in the mailbox, and I check my mailbox all the time,” she told the Post. “You never know what’s going to be in there.”

According to Vietnam+