Petition for Trump’s tax returns gets record number of signatures

A WhiteHouse.gov petition demanding that President Trump release his personal income tax returns has broken the website’s record for signatures.

As of 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, the petition had received 369,550 signatures. That’s close to 2,400 more than the previous record holder, a 2012 petition urging the government to recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group.

The petition was created hours after Trump took the oath of office on Friday, and it attracted the 100,000 signatures it needed to warrant an official response from the White House within 24 hours. Petitions on the website are given a month to get the required number of signatures.

{mosads}Trump shattered decades of precedent during the 2016 campaign by refusing to release his personal tax returns. At a news conference earlier this month, the president said that he had no intention of ever doing so, and argued that journalists were the only ones that wanted him to release the documents.

Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway reaffirmed on Sunday that the president would not release the returns, saying that “people didn’t care.”

“The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns,” she said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” when asked to respond to the petition. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.”

The record number of signatures was first reported by The Huffington Post