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As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump teased that the release of his tax returns was imminent, pointing to the scale and complexity of his wealth as a reason that he had so far bucked tradition by failing to release his financial information.
“I have very big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time,” Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” at the time, adding, “This is not, like, a normal tax return.”
The tax returns never materialized. Over the next seven years, Trump first blamed an invasive Internal Revenue Service audit for his refusal to make his returns public and then, as president, waged an extended legal battle against House Democrats who sought to force their release.
Several years of tax return data obtained by The New York Times showed that Trump paid scant income taxes over the years and detailed the financial struggles of his properties, yet the full scope of his tax history remained shrouded in secrecy.
That could change this week. On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee will vote to decide whether to make public six years of the former president’s tax records. That action comes after the Supreme Court last month declined to block the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, from releasing the returns to Congress. The decision paved the way for the returns to be transferred from the IRS to the Ways and Means Committee.
Now, in the days before they hand control of the House to Republicans, Democrats must decide exactly what to do with the documents.
The formal release of Trump’s tax records would represent both a significant act of transparency and what some fear is the end of an era of taxpayer privacy.
“If they get revealed, it seems to me they ought to have a pretty good reason for why that’s in the public interest,” said John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner in the Obama and Trump administrations. “It’s a dangerous precedent.”
Presidents are not required by law to release their tax returns, but for decades they have done so voluntarily to demonstrate to the American public that they have nothing to hide. It would also raise questions about whether, in this case, Democrats on the House committee created a pretext for using their power as a political weapon against an opponent.
