First petition on revised White House website calls for disclosure of President Trump's tax returns

Streets across the US teemed with protesters as Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45<sup>thpresident of the country on 20 January. Soon after, the White House website also joined in, with a petition demanding the new president release his tax returns.

Former president Barack Obama's administration first added the We the People online petition system to whitehouse.gov in 2011 to allow Americans to create petitions on the site, share them, and sign them in order to get the attention of the president.

The Trump administration took over the site soon after the inauguration and despite the numerous changes, kept the petition system intact.

"The unprecedented economic conflicts of this administration need to be visible to the American people, including any pertinent documentation which can reveal the foreign influences and financial interests which may put Donald Trump in conflict with the emoluments clause of the Constitution," the petition for Trump's tax records reads.

At the time of writing this, the page had already garnered over 79,000 signatures and requires reaching a target of 100,000 by 19 February in order to get a response from the White House.

The petition page is the second most popular one on the website according to analytics.usa.gov, a site that tracks the webpages of US federal government agencies. The only other page with more views is the White House's homepage.

President Trump, however, has reiterated that he will not release his taxes and has blamed the media for unnecessarily putting focus on the subject.