This was Rachel Maddow’s Geraldo Rivera moment.
On Tuesday night the shrill MSNBC host baited audiences with an extended monologue, where she could be seen wringing her hands in anticipation of ‘the big one’ – a scene of hype and overindulgence by the media which was reminiscent of Geraldo Rivera’ epic flop, Al Capone’s Vaults which aired back in 1986.
What followed was almost too ridiculous to comment on. This was mainstream media fake news at its absolute finest.
Maddow shows up on air holding the cover pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 federal income tax returns. The only problem was that it showed Trump paying more tax than most people – he paid $38 million in federal taxes on only $150 million in income that year – a higher rate than was paid by Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and even MSNBC itself.
Newsbusters reports: “Wednesday afternoon, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow gave an interview to the Associated Press defending her actions following her epic fail regarding the tease and reveal of President Trump’s 2005 tax returns by blaming viewers for overblowing the revelation. Maddow spoke to the AP’s David Bauder (who, to be transparent, has frequently cited and quoted members of the MRC in the past) and, in Bauder’s summation, “says that if people felt let down by her story about President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax document it’s more because of the weight of expectation than anything she did.” Bauder noted how a tweet from her account 90 minutes prior to her show “set off a social media frenzy” and thus “expectations were sky high.”
It turns out that these “leaked” IRS papers were placed in the mailbox of none other than one of Hillary Clinton’s anointed campaign journalists, Michael Cay Johnston – who, with the help of Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! last summer, promoted the accusation that then presidential candidate Trump has committed tax fraud. It appears that Johnston was so excited to be the first to get a hold of at least part of Trump’s tax returns that he didn’t bother to consider that a Trump operative may have place this big find in his mail box.
Watch as Maddow and Johnston labor over this non-story, in one of the most hyped media fails in recent memory:
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