Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released Friday by a Democrat-led House Committee after the former president fought to keep them secret.
Thousands of pages of documents reviewed by confirm Trump paid little federal income tax while in the White House and paid nothing in 2020.
He and his wife Melania reported that they had negative income of $53.2 million from 2015-2020.
And Trump paid $1.7 million in taxes over six years, including just $750 in 2016 and 2017.
The returns show that Trump maintained financial accounts in China, the UK, Ireland and St. Martin.
House Democrats released former President Donald Trump’s six-year tax returns on Friday.
Boxes of documents leave the hearing room where the House Ways and Means Committee met December 20 and voted in favor of former President Donald Trump’s tax break
The House Ways and Means Committee dropped the results Friday morning with just four days left of the Democratic majority.
The returns cover the years 2015 to 2020 – two years that Trump ran for president and then the four years that he was in the White House.
They span nearly 6,000 pages — more than 2,700 personal testimonials from the ex-president and his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, and more than 3,000 pages from Trump’s companies.
In both 2015 and 2016, Trump reported adjusted gross income of around -$32 million and in 2016 it was around -$13 million, but he was back in the black in 2018 with adjusted gross income of $24 million. In 2019 it was $4.4 million.
In 2020, his final year in the White House, he was again in the red, reporting an adjusted gross income of -$4.8 million.
He paid some taxes in five of the six years.
In 2015 he paid $641,931. In both 2016 and 2017, he only paid $750. In 2018, the year he had the highest adjusted gross income, he also paid the most in federal taxes: $999,466. And in 2019 he paid $133,445.
Trump paid zero dollars in federal income tax in 2020, returns showed.
In 2020, former President Donald Trump paid no federal taxes. He reported an adjusted gross income of -$4.8 million that year
In 2015, the year that former President Donald Trump launched a successful presidential bid, he reported near-negative earnings of $32 million
Presidents should be audited annually by the Internal Revenue Service, but that didn’t happen in Trump’s case.
Democrats used this as justification for releasing returns publicly, while Republicans argued Democrats were doing so for political reasons and setting a dangerous precedent.
“Our findings proved simple — the IRS didn’t begin their mandatory review of the former president until after I submitted my first application,” House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement on Friday.
The committee’s top Republican, Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, countered that statement, insisting that transcripts of the “Secret Executive Session of the Democrats” prove that the IRS conducted audits of Trump’s taxes prior to the Democrats’ motion.
“Despite these facts, Democrats have made an unprecedented decision to unleash a dangerous new political weapon that will reach well beyond the former president and undo decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since Watergate,” Brady said in a statement Friday.
Trump has already announced a candidacy for the White House for 2024.
The ex-president shamed Democrats for releasing his returns on Friday, but also boasted about what they said about him as a longtime real estate developer and television personality.
“The Democrats should never have done it, the Supreme Court should never have approved it, and it’s going to lead to terrible things for so many people,” Trump said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal on Friday. “The radical left Democrats have armed everything, but remember, this is a dangerous one-way street!”
He added to CBS News‘The ‘Trump’ tax returns show once again how proud I was and how I was able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive to create thousands of jobs and great structures and businesses.’