House Democrats Release Six Years of Trump’s Tax Returns

House Democrats released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns after a years-long legal battle.

Summary

After a years-long legal battle, House Democrats released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns in an unprecedented move days before Republicans take over the House of Representatives.

• Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee published Trump’s business and personal tax returns totaling 46 documents consisting of thousands of pages of returns.
• The release comes after a party-line vote last week to publish the former president’s tax information and a Supreme Court ruling in November that forced the Treasury Department to hand the returns over to the Ways and Means Committee.
• Committee chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) sued the Treasury Department in 2019, arguing the tax-writing panel needed the returns to oversee the IRS’s annual audits of presidential tax returns. Trump and Republicans called the move an invasion of privacy.
• “The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people,” Trump said in a statement on Truth Social.
• House Republicans slammed Democrats for publishing “cherry-picked information” to spin a narrative unfavorable to the 76-year-old former president and 2024 presidential candidate.
• Democrats “selected limited pieces of audit materials; they didn’t provide very many source documents that would allow you to evaluate for yourself whether their interpretations are fair,” one G.O.P. aide told POLITICO.
• Trump’s tax returns were not audited by the IRS during his first two years in office despite an IRS policy requiring audits for sitting presidents.
• Donald and Melania Trump reported significant business losses on their tax returns, allowing the real estate mogul to avoid paying personal income tax. Trump was the first presidential candidate since the 1960s to refuse to voluntarily release his tax returns.
• The former president and first lady reported a negative income of $4.7 million in 2020, with $0 taxable income and no tax burden, while reportedly claiming a tax refund of $5.47 million.

•  “The release came 10 days after Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee published two reports about Mr. Trump’s taxes as part of an inquiry into the Internal Revenue Service’s practice of conducting mandatory audits on presidents while they are in office,” The New York Times reported. “The reports found that the I.R.S. failed to audit Mr. Trump during the first two years of his presidency and did not begin the examination process until 2019 after House Democrats initiated oversight proceedings.” 
• The Times also broke down the key numbers from Trump’s tax returns. The former president paid $1.1 million in federal taxes in his first years in office, and his financial fortunes appeared to decline during his presidency. 
• CNN picked up the response from Kevin Brady, the committee’s top Republican. Brady said in a statement the Democrats’ move was “a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president and overturns decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since the Watergate reform.”

• Breitbart noted Democrats saved the “unprecedented dissemination” of Trump’s tax returns for their last days of House control before Republicans take power next week. The former president blasted the move as an “outrageous abuse of power.”
• House Democrats’ legal fight for Trump’s tax documents can be traced back to when Democrats took control of the House in 2019, National Review observed. Neal sued the Treasury for Trump’s returns in 2019 while he was in office, and only in November 2022 did the Supreme Court finally allow the committee to obtain them.
• Ways and Means Republicans condemned the release, per The New York Post. Committee members said earlier this week, “Democrats are wielding a new political weapon by releasing confidential tax information despite claiming it was done for a legitimate legislative purpose.”

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© Dominic Moore, 2022