The release takes place in the waning days of the Democratic control of the House, and as the AP reports, it takes on new importance as Trump launches his third run at the presidency.
Of course, Republicans were not in favor of releasing the former president’s returns.
Rep. Kevin Brady, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, told CNN that the release could result in “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.
“We are unified in our concern the Democrats may today move forward with unprecedented action that will jeopardize the right of every American to be protected from political targeting by Congress,” Brady said.
Trump is already on the attack, saying what the committee is doing is an “outrageous abuse of power” and a “deranged witch hunt,” and inciting Republicans to take revenge by demanding President Joe Biden be forced to release his financial statements.
“We should also get to the bottom line of how Biden, on a salary of a US senator, was able to buy one mansion after another; all these different locations,” Trump said. “When I’m president, we will expose the Washington cartel and we will make America great again.”
In case you’re wondering, Biden released his tax returns 23 times, going back to 1998.
CBS News reports that Trump’s returns will likely be extremely complicated to sort through. The former president has over 400 separate entities, which include trusts, corporations, and partnerships.
Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant and founder of Dubinsky Consulting, explains that Trump’s return will have a “white paper schedule in the back — it may be five or 10 pages long — it’s going to list all these entities … We’re not going to know what those [entities] are doing. You’re just going see a line and an amount — could be income, could be a loss — for that year. We would then need those LLC or S corporation returns to see, OK, what’s going on?”
An IRS memo cited in the Ways and Means report says, “With over 400 flow-thru returns reported on the Form 1040, it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues.”
For decades, Trump has bragged about his immense wealth and used it time and again to secure loans and to attempt to justify his positioning in financial outlets.
New York Attorney General Leticia James dubbed it “the art of the steal” (a reference to Trump’s 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal) in a 222-page lawsuit filed in state court in Manhattan in September.
Trump’s shady tax returns have been the subject of suspicion and controversy for years.
In 2018, The New York Times reported that a significant amount of the money Trump got from his father’s real estate holdings came to him “because he helped his parents dodge taxes” in the 1990s.
Another report from the Times in 2020 found that Trump only paid $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017 and no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.
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