UPDATED: 9:27 p.m. EST -- The investigative journalist who broke the news of President Donald Trump's tax returns from 2005 said he was mailed them.

"They came in the mail," David Cay Johnston told Rachel Maddow on her cable TV show Tuesday night. He said Trump very well could have been the person who sent them because the president has a history of leaking information to the press as a way to control the dissemination of the reporting.

To watch a live stream of "The Rachel Maddow Show" Tuesday night, click here to go to MSNBC's website.

Johnston said he broke no law in obtaining the tax documents, as he did not solicited them. The White House released a statement prior to Maddow's show suggesting laws were broken to make the taxes public. Johnston did not say when he received them.

UPDATED: 9:02 p.m. EST -- MSNBC was given President Donald Trump's taxes from 2005 by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist specializing in economics, Rachel Maddow said on her TV show Tuesday night. Maddow had tweeted about an hour earlier than she was planning on revealing the president's tax returns.

To watch a live stream of Tuesday's show, click here to go to MSNBC's website.

Maddow began her show saying Trump's taxes were "turned over to a reporter" before she said, "The way we got this document is through David Cay Johnson." His website dcreport.org obtained this return, she added.

UPDATED: 8:43 p.m. EST -- The White House has responded to a cable news TV show's claims that it will make President Donald Trump's tax returns public during her cable TV show Tuesday night. "The Rachel Maddow Show" was "desperate for ratings" and has resorted to breaking the law to get his tax returns, a brief statement said in part.

"The Rachel Maddow Show" starts at 9 p.m. EST and is televised nightly on MSNBC. To watch a live stream of Tuesday's show, click here to go to MSNBC's website.

The White House's full statement follows below:

The Trump taxes that were expected to be revealed were from 2005, according to multiple reports on social media.

Original story:

Political pundit Rachel Maddow has suggested that President Donald Trump's "tax returns" would be revealed on her eponymous cable TV show Tuesday night. While the claim may seem farfetched, what with the president having sidestepped historical precedent to withhold the financial information from the public, Maddow insisted that it was true.

"(Seriously)," she tweeted parenthetically.

"The Rachel Maddow Show" starts at 9 p.m. EST and is televised nightly on MSNBC. To watch a live stream of Tuesday's show, click here to go to MSNBC's website.

Read: Warren Buffett Urges Donald Trump To Release Tax Information

Trump became the first president in modern history to not provide his tax history for the American public's inspection. He has maintained all along that because the Internal Revenue Service was auditing him, he was forbidden by the government from revealing them.

The president's closest advisers echoed his claims following inauguration in January.

Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway also downplayed the importance many Americans have placed on the transparent symbolism that every president for the past 40 years has done.

"We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care," Conway said on ABC's "This Week." "They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are — are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like."

Maddow's vow was seemingly out of nowhere, as the topic of Trump's taxes had given way to the repealing and replacement of Obamacare and a travel ban. The "Rachel Maddow Show"'s web page made no mention of Trump's taxes in its "mini-report" that was published at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

The last time Trump mentioned his taxes in public was during a news conference on Jan. 11.

"I’m not releasing the tax returns because as you know they’re under audit," he said while saying his taxes were irrelevant to voters. "The only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters."

He continued: "You learn very little from a tax return."