House Committee Votes to Release Trump’s Tax Returns to the Public – Tuesday, a key congressional committee voted to make public Donald Trump’s tax returns, a decision that is certain to spark a political dispute and indignation among some American privacy experts. The Democratic-controlled House ways and means committee decided to release the documents, which the former US president has long tried to shield, after several hours of debate. The New York Times had previously published considerable portions of Trump’s tax returns, which revealed that the real estate mogul and reality television star had sustained significant financial losses and engaged in massive tax avoidance.
The panel’s decision comes after a lengthy legal battle that concluded in the supreme court paving the way for the Treasury Department to transmit the returns to Congress last month. The committee got Trump’s and some of his businesses’ six-year tax returns. As a 2016 presidential candidate, Trump violated decades of precedent by refusing to reveal his tax forms. In the same year, he boasted during a presidential debate that he was “smart” since he paid no federal taxes. Later, he claimed he wouldn’t personally benefit from the 2017 tax cuts he signed into law that favored people with extreme wealth, asking Americans to simply take him at his word.
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Tax records would have been a useful metric for judging his success in business. The image of a savvy businessman was key to a political brand honed during his years as a tabloid magnet and star of The Apprentice television show. They also could reveal any financial obligations – including foreign debts – that could influence how he governed. But Americans were largely in the dark about Trump’s relationship with the IRS until October 2018 and September 2020, when The New York Times published two separate series based on leaked tax records.
The 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles revealed that Trump got at least $413 million through his father’s real estate holdings, the majority of which came from what the New York Times termed “tax dodges” in the 1990s. In 2021, Trump filed a lawsuit against the Times and his niece, Mary Trump, for releasing the documents to the publication. In November, Mary Trump petitioned an appeals court to reverse a judge’s decision to dismiss her claims that her uncle and two of his siblings scammed her out of millions of dollars in a 2001 family settlement.
In 2017 and 2018, Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes, according to articles in 2020. Trump did not pay any income taxes for ten of the past fifteen years because he consistently lost more money than he made. The tax forms also included information on Trump’s income from foreign operations and debt levels, which the former president dismissed as “fake news.” After a lengthy legal fight that included two trips to the Supreme Court, the Manhattan district attorney’s office received copies of Donald Trump’s tax returns in February 2021.
In 2019, the office led by then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. had sent a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm, demanding access to eight years of Trump’s tax returns and related records. The DA’s office filed the subpoena after Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Trump had lied about the worth of his assets to tax officials, insurers, and business colleagues. In September, New York attorney general Letitia James filed a fraud case against Trump and his company based on these allegations.
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Donald Bender, Trump’s longtime accountant, said at the recent criminal trial of the Trump Organization that Trump claimed losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including roughly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010. The Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud earlier this month for assisting executives in evading taxes on company-paid benefits such as residences and luxury vehicles. The Republican opposition to the potential release is based on the argument that it would set a dangerous precedent.
Trump has contended that there is little to gather from his tax returns while fighting to keep them private. “You can’t learn much from tax returns, but it is illegal to release them if they are not yours!” he complained on his social media network last weekend. Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas, the ways and means committee’s Republican leader, has accused Democrats on the committee of “unleashing a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond President Trump, and jeopardizes the privacy of every American.”
