Liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is defending herself from critics who said she misled her audience into believing she had a bombshell report on President Trump's taxes.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Maddow said she had never intended to create the impression that she was going to expose "damning information" about Trump.

"Because I have information about the president doesn't mean that it's necessarily a scandal," she said Wednesday. "It doesn't mean that it's damning information. If other people leapt to that conclusion without me indicating that it was, that hype is external to what we did."

It was the previous night, ahead of her primetime show, that Maddow wrote on social media that she "seriously" possessed Trump's tax returns.

Her tease about information that the news media have long sought after left many believing that the returns she had would prove consequential in some way.

But after Maddow revealed the tax document on her show, nearly half an hour into the program, other journalists watching said they felt let down because the documents, from year 2005, only showed that Trump had millions of dollars of income and paid about a 25 percent federal income tax rate.

"I don't really care," Maddow said of her critics. "It is funny to me that a president would spend this much energy and political capital to keep secret his finances and his taxes specifically and simultaneously would want to brag about how much money he made. If that's really what he wants the story to be, he can release all of his taxes and we can all glory in his immense wealth."