The Trump administration borrowed from a former Clinton adviser's playbook to preempt Rachel Maddow's purported scoop on the president's old tax returns on Tuesday.
Maddow teased a mega-scoop that sent shockwaves through journalism Twitter hours before her 9 p.m. show.
BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC.
(Seriously).
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 14, 2017
The White House put a damper on the hype by revealing the contents of the purported scoop: a 12-year-old two-page tax form that revealed Trump paid a 25 percent tax rate on $150 million in income. Thirty minutes before air, Maddow conceded she had not obtained the more recent tax returns that journalists have long clamored for after Trump refused to disclose on the campaign trail.
What we've got is from 2005... the President's 1040 form... details to come tonight 9PM ET, MSNBC.
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 15, 2017
Trump's strategic release of the document mirrored a strategy perfected by former top Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos, who now serves as a morning television host for ABC.
In May 2015, the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the anchor about $75,000 in donations he made to the Clinton Foundation—contributions that he failed to disclose while reporting on Hillary Clinton. Stephanopoulos and his team chose to leak the information to a Politico media reporter, rather than respond to the query, leading the Washington Post to conclude that ABC had given the Free Beacon the "shaft."
The White House did not respond to an email asking if the move was inspired by Stephanopoulos.
Maddow dedicated her entire show to the 2005 document, but waited until after the first commercial break to discuss its contents. Some liberal journalists expressed disappointment with Maddow's handling of the information, especially after the White House had turned "her big scoop about Donald Trump’s long-missing tax returns into a cautionary tale about overhype," as a Slate television critic put it.
"The longer Maddow went on, ever deeper into a conspiratorial thicket, the clearer it became that whatever tax returns Maddow had, they weren’t as juicy as the ones she was talking about," Slate reported. "Maddow even went so far as to hold the tax returns back until after the first commercial break, as if we were watching an episode of The Bachelor and not a matter of national importance—because we weren’t, in fact, watching a matter of national importance, just a cable news show trying to set a ratings record."