Donald Trump.Photo: Evan Vucci/AP/Shutterstock
The U.S. Supreme Court this week paved the way for a Democrat-controlled House committee to receiveDonald Trump’s tax returns.
Democrat Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, initially sought the tax returns from the IRS in 2019, while Trump was still in office.
When the agency said it would not hand over the returns, the Ways and Means Committee sued the IRS, Treasury, and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin,CNBC reports.
The case continued to make its way through both federal and state courts, with Trump’s legal team repeatedly losing its efforts to shield the returns from public view.
Last year, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the IRS was obligated to release the returns to the House, a move that the former president’s attorneys pushed against. Then, in August, a three-judge federal appeals court panel upheld the earlier decision.
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Democrats on the House committee have said they want to examine the returns to investigate any possible conflicts of interest that could arise for a president.
Some of Trump’s tax information has leaked since his rise in politics. In 2020,The New York Timespublished a series of articles analyzing some of Trump’s tax documents, and reporting that the self-proclaimed billionaire paid a total of $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017 thanks to a nearly $10 million tax credit partially connected to a hotel project in Washington, D.C.
In total, theTimesanalyzed 18 years' worth of tax returns for Trump and his businesses going back to 2000, finding that he paid zero income taxes in 10 of those years. According to the paper, it was “largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”
source: people.com
