The papers have become highly sought-after as he refused to release his returns during the campaign.

The White House said that U.S. President Donald Trump made more than $150 million in income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year.

The acknowledgement came shortly before MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported on two pages of Mr. Trump’s 2005 tax forms on her Tuesday night show.

The records were obtained by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who said he received the documented unsolicited, in the mail.

He was mum on it

The documents have become highly sought-after because Mr. Trump refused to release his returns during the campaign, breaking a decades-long tradition. He claimed he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and said his attorneys had advised against it though experts and IRS officials said such audits don’t bar taxpayers from releasing their returns.

The White House pushed back pre-emptively on Tuesday night, saying that publishing those returns would be illegal.

“You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago,” the White House said in a statement.

The unauthorised release or publishing of federal tax returns is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to five years in jail. But Ms. Maddow argued that MSNBC was exercising its First Amendment right to publish information in the public interest.

Based on the documents obtained by Mr. Johnston, Mr. Trump paid $36.5 million in taxes on $153 million in income, for an effective tax rate of around 24 per cent. That percentage is higher than the roughly 10 per cent the average American pays each year but below the 27.4 per cent that taxpayers earning 1 million dollars a year average, according to data from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Alternative Minimum Tax

Mr. Trump’s tax returns spotlight the role of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was established nearly five decades ago to prevent the wealthy from using deductions and clever accounting to largely avoid paying taxes.