In discount time, days before the House of Representatives passes into Republican hands, a Democrat-controlled commission has released former President Donald Trump’s six-year tax returns. The release of the edited records ends a long lawsuit that Republicans filed to keep them from seeing the light, but not the controversy surrounding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS, in its acronym in English; the U.S. Treasury Department), who is unable to accurately scrutinize the tycoon’s business volume while he was in the presidency. The revelation adds another blemish to Trump’s record after he announced his intention to run in the 2024 election.
According to data released this Friday, Trump paid $1.1 million in federal income taxes in his first three years as president and none in 2020, when his income began to decline. Once in the White House, the tycoon handed his eldest sons the reins of the family business, the Trump Organization, which was recorded as having an adjusted gross income of $15.8 million in his first three years as president. In the two years leading up to his arrival in the White House, the Republican posted huge business losses, according to records for fiscal years between 2015 and 2020.
Until last month’s Supreme Court decision authorizing the broadcast of Trump’s statements from 2015 to 2020, the work of the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Democrat Richard Neal, has been a continuous stumble since 2019. The Republican went through all sorts of courts to prevent them from ever seeing the light of day, with arguments as odd as that the size of his real estate deals prevented him from valuing them and giving an account of them. A similar argument was used to explain the short-sightedness of the IRS, which was unable to fully audit him during his tenure, despite the committee passing legislation that would require the Treasury Department to complete on-site audits within 90 days of his inauguration.
“A president is no ordinary taxpayer. He has power and influence unmatched by any other American citizen. With that great power comes greater responsibility,” Richard Neal said in a statement.
After successfully escaping two impeachment trials imposed on him by the House of Representatives, Donald Trump, 76, faces a complicated legal offensive that could cloud his political future or, conversely, give wings to his most extremist supporters. The congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has moved to indict Trump on four crimes, including obstruction of justice and insurgency. The FBI seized confidential documents the Republican took from the White House, and two ongoing investigations in New York, one civil and the other criminal, are analyzing his business for alleged tax fraud.
The House Ways and Means Committee requested the statements in 2019, arguing that Congress needed them to evaluate IRS scrutiny of the president’s tax returns, a purpose Republicans see as politically motivated. Trump, who took office in January 2017, was the first presidential candidate since the 1970s not to make his taxes public. He sued the committee to try to keep it private, but the Supreme Court ruled against him by a conservative majority.
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In 2016, while he was still running for president, the tycoon cited the scale and complexity of his finances as a reason for defying the tradition followed by all White House hopefuls of religiously releasing their tax returns. “They are not like a normal tax return,” he said in a television interview at the time. For the next seven years, the Republican also resisted publishing them, first on the pretext of an “invasive” IRS scrutiny motivated precisely by his refusal to publish them; then from 2019 in response to the House of Representatives initiative.
Records show that Trump’s income and tax liability fluctuated widely from 2015 to 2020 during his presidential campaign and subsequent tenure. They show that for part of this period, Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, took large deductions, claimed losses, and paid little or no income tax. In 2016, the year he won the election, and 2017, his first in the White House, the Republican paid $750 in federal taxes, according to a 20-year investigation of tax information by The New York Times, published in September 2020, two months before the elections. The exclusive showed that he hadn’t paid any income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because from 2011 to 2018 he said he lost more money than he made.
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