House Ways and Means Committee releases Trump’s tax returns
December 30, 2022
Former President Trump sought to block the release of his tax returns.
WASHINGTON — House Democrats released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday in one of their final acts before returning power to Republicans next week.
The release of the documents, which cover the years from 2015 to 2020, is the final chapter in a long-running legal battle between the 76-year-old former president and the House Ways and Means Committee, which sued in 2019 seeking Trump’s financial information.
The returns span nearly 6,000 pages — including more than 2,700 pages of individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, and more than 3,000 pages in returns for Trump’s business entities. Some personal information, such as Social Security and bank account numbers, was redacted.
The committee released its main findings last week in a 29-page summary — including that Trump regularly claimed large losses, reducing his tax payments.
Trump and his wife reported negative income in four of the six years in question, recording positive income to the tune of $24.3 million in 2018 and $4.4 million in 2019. The couple paid nearly $1 million in taxes in 2018 and $133,445 in 2019.
In 2015, the Trumps paid $641,931 in federal taxes after reporting a loss of $31.7 million.
The returns also give some indications of the former president’s business interests in China, where he reported spending more than $8.5 million in business expenses in 2015 and more than $10 million in 2016, while he was running for president.
In 2018, Trump reported making nearly $1 million “from sources within” China. In 2019, that number fell to just $19 and disappeared in 2020, though he reported $18,555 in deductions from business dealings with Beijing that year.
The tax returns also show that Trump claimed foreign tax credits for licensing arrangements that allowed the use of his name on development projects and his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.
The release of the documents on the Friday before New Year’s weekend muted the conclusion of the long-running drama, with some Trump investigation followers griping that the records were compressed into a .zip file rather than published as PDF web pages.
“A zipped file? How about posting it on the Internet as pages. Sheesh,” tweeted filmmaker Jeremy Newberger.
Outgoing Ways and Means Committee chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) did not personally tweet about the release Friday morning or issue a fresh statement, with the panel instead recirculating a 10-day-old statement in which he said, “A president is no ordinary taxpayer. They hold power and influence unlike any other American. And with great power comes even greater responsibility.”
Trump returned fire Friday, saying, “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. The great USA divide will now grow far worse. The Radical Left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street! The ‘Trump’ tax returns once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”
The Democrat-led committee said it needed the tax returns to review the IRS’s mandatory audit program for presidents. The panel’s executive summary stated that it found “there was only one mandatory audit started and none completed during [Trump’s] four years in office.”
Trump claimed during the 2016 campaign and throughout his presidency that he could not release the documents due to IRS audits. His political adversaries speculated that his tax returns could have shown that he is less wealthy than he has said — even undercutting his status as a billionaire.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, said in 2016 that “we have good reason to believe that there’s a bombshell in Donald Trump’s taxes. Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn’t been paying taxes we would expect him to pay or perhaps he hasn’t been giving money to vets or to the disabled like he’s been telling us he’s been doing.”
The Trump Organization, Trump’s primary business entity, was found guilty on Dec. 6 of 17 financial crimes, including tax fraud, falsifying business records and conspiracy over 15 years.
The 45th president’s longtime accountant, Donald Bender, testified at the Manhattan Supreme Court trial that Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including nearly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010.
Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP who spent years preparing Trump’s personal tax returns, said Trump’s reported losses from 2009 to 2018 included net operating losses from some of the many businesses he owns through the Trump Organization.
The House Ways and Means Committee ultimately didn’t resolve some of the bigger questions about Trump’s taxes or produce a neatly packaged and damning bombshell revelation.
The committee’s report last week said that an IRS memo raised, but didn’t answer, major questions about Trump’s finances, including whether he properly claimed a $21 million conservation deduction in 2015 related to preserving forests and meadows near a Westchester County mansion that he owned.
The Democratic report said IRS agents believed various other issues “warranted examination,” including Trump citing $105 million in losses in 2015 that were spread over future years to reduce taxes — concluding a $700 million loss Trump stretched over many years beginning in 2009 during the Great Recession.
The report said the IRS agents also were interested in $27 million in unreimbursed expense deductions to so-called “S corporations” and other entities over six years and in whether loans to Trump’s children really were gifts intended to avoid taxation.
It’s unclear how likely it is that the IRS ultimately will accuse Trump of an infraction, but federal tax agents are notoriously reticent to commit resources to going after wealthy taxpayers who can put up substantial resources to fight allegations.
Meanwhile, President Biden has been accused of illicitly underpaying Medicare taxes on more than $13 million in income in 2017 and 2018, and records from first son Hunter Biden’s former laptop indicate the president may have taken as much as “half” of the income from lucrative Biden family consulting work in countries where he held sway as Barack Obama’s vice president, such as China and Ukraine.
“This precedent must now be applied to the corrupt Democrats themselves. The new Republican House should immediately obtain the financial records of Joe Biden and his entire criminal enterprise,” Trump said. “Biden is a corrupt politician who spent years selling out America all over the world, including to communist China — just take a look at his accounts, take a look at all of his homes and take a look at what his son Hunter has contributed to the family.”
4 comments:
Gee, an international businessman had international bank accounts. That is highly suspicious.
“This precedent must now be applied to the corrupt Democrats themselves. The new Republican House should immediately obtain the financial records of Joe Biden and his entire criminal enterprise."
They should. Whether or not they will is another question. Trump was an outsider. Biden is the classic insider. A LOT of people who work "in the system" will want to protect him on general principle. Hopefully enough will not that the senile old fart will have his ass handed to him. I am not holding my breath for that.
Will come back and bite some politicians on the ass.
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