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WikiLeaks is on the hunt for Donald Trump's tax returns

Hell hath no fury like a whistleblowing organization with a bone to pick.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
2 min read
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A protester dressed like Donald Duck hands out "Trump Ducks" while protesting the president's refusal to release his tax returns.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

WikiLeaks smells a Trump scandal brewing.

The whistleblowing organization expressed its annoyance on Sunday that President Donald Trump reneged on his promise to publicly release his tax returns.

In a series of tweets, the organization said that if Trump would not release the information, it would do so on his behalf. His refusal to release years' worth of tax returns, which White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway confirmed on Sunday, was "even more gratuitous than [Hillary] Clinton concealing her Goldman Sachs transcripts," said one tweet.


The threat capped off a rough first weekend for Trump, who took his oath of office on Friday but enters with the lowest approval ratings for an incoming president. He also faced hundreds of thousands of protestors in Washington, DC, and other cities on Saturday, and at one point lashed out at the demonstrators on Twitter.

Trump's refusal to release his tax documents was a major issue during the 2016 campaign. Now WikiLeaks is threatening to make it an issue again.

It wouldn't be WikiLeaks' first intervention in US presidential matters. The organization played a controversial role in the presidential campaign by leaking emails and other potentially damaging details about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. It downplayed accusations that it was partisan and was trying to influence the outcome of the election, saying it had not received any relevant material pertaining to Trump.

The matter gets even more tangled from there. US intelligence agencies, in their report on Russian meddling in the US election, have said that WikiLeaks got hold of Democratic National Committee emails from Russian hackers.

Now WikiLeaks is actively seeking out Trump-related material, asking anyone privy to the tax returns to submit the documents anonymously. The new US president had promised to release those returns since last May. He claimed at the time that he was being audited and would wait until the after the audit to make the details public.

Trump is the first American president in 40 years not to reveal the extent of his financial interests and obligations.

Conway, speaking on ABC's "This Week," said people didn't care about his tax returns, reiterating a claim Trump has previously made.

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