Johnston received a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of taxes in The New York Times. He is the author or editor of seven books, four of them New York Times�����Ի���Wall Street Journal��������ٲ�����������.

He is currently the editor-in-chief of DCReport.org, which covers what the president and Congress do, not what they say. In March 2017 he published at DCReport the summary pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return.

His journalism career began in 1968 as a 19-year-old front page staff writer for the San Jose Mercury. Johnston has exposed political spying and brutality by the Los Angeles Police Department, exposed foreign agents, revealed news manipulations that caused a six-station Midwest broadcast chain to be forced out of business, revealed Enron did not pay taxes and that some companies use a Bermuda mail box to escape American taxes. He also solved a 1980 Southern California murder by confronting the killer, winning freedom for an innocent man sentenced to life in prison. His �վ��������reporting shut down so many tax dodges and prompted so many prosecutions that he was called the “de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.”

Johnston’s next book will propose a 21st Century tax system to replace the existing Internal Revenue Code.