President Donald Trump earned $US153 million and paid $US36.5 million in income taxes in 2005, paying a roughly 25 per cent effective tax rate thanks to a tax he has since sought to eliminate.
Pages from Trump's federal tax return show the then-real estate mogul also reported a business loss of $US103 million that year, although the documents don't provide detail.
The return was obtained by journalist David Cay Johnston, who runs a website called DCReport.org, and reported live on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show.
Johnston, who has long reported on tax issues, said he received the documents in the mail, unsolicited.
The forms show that Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24.5 per cent, a figure well above the roughly 10 per cent the average American taxpayer forks out each year, but below the 27.4 per cent that taxpayers earning $US1 million dollars a year average.
Trump's hefty business loss appears to be a continued benefit from his use of a tax loophole in the 1990s, which allowed him to deduct previous losses in future years.
In 1995, Trump reported a loss of more than $US900 million, largely as a result of financial turmoil at his casinos.
The White House pushed back even before the release of the documents by MSNBC, saying that publishing the information was 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 offense, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to five years in jail.
But Rachel Maddow argued that MSNBC was exercising its First Amendment right to publish information in the public interest.
Trump has long insisted the American public wasn't interested in his returns and said little could be learned from them.
But Trump's full returns would contain key details about things like his charitable giving, his income sources, the type of deductions he claimed, how much he earned from his assets and what strategies Trump used to reduce his tax bill.
The issue was a major point of attack from his election rival Hillary Clinton, who suggested Trump had something to hide.
Tax records obtained by The New York Times last year showed the losses were so large they could have allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes for up to 18 years.
But Trump's 2005 filing shows another tax prevented him from realising the full benefit of those deductions.
The bulk of Trump's tax bill that year was due to the Alternative Minimum Tax, a tax aimed at preventing high-income earners from paying minimal taxes.
Were it not for the AMT, Trump would have avoided all but a few million dollars of his 2005 tax bill.
Trump's campaign website called for the end of the AMT, which is expected to bring in more than $US350 billion in revenues from 2016 to 2025.
