Democrats in Congress released hundreds of pages of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday, providing essentially the most detailed picture to this point of his funds over a six-year period, including his time within the White House, when he fought to maintain the knowledge private in a break with a long time of precedent.
The documents include individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, together with Trump’s business entities from 2015-2020. They show how Trump used the tax code to lower his tax obligation and reveal details about foreign accounts, charitable contributions and the performance of a few of his highest-profile business ventures, which had largely remained shielded from public scrutiny.
The disclosure marks the culmination of a yearslong legal fight that has played out in all places from the presidential campaign to Congress and the Supreme Court as Trump persistently rejected efforts to share details about his financial history — counter to the practice of transparency followed by all his predecessors within the post-Watergate era. The records release comes just days before Republicans retake control of the House and weeks after Trump began one other campaign for the White House.
Trump, in line with the filings, reported having bank accounts in China, Ireland and the UK in 2015 through 2017, whilst he was commander in chief. Starting in 2018, nonetheless, he only reported an account within the U.K. The returns also show that Trump claimed foreign tax credits for taxes he paid on various business ventures all over the world, including licensing arrangements to be used of his name on development projects and his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.
Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015, the 12 months he began his campaign for president, in line with a report released last week by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. He paid $750 in 2016 and 2017, nearly $1 million in 2018, $133,445 in 2019 and nothing in 2020, the 12 months he unsuccessfully sought reelection.
The documents show that Trump’s charitable donations fluctuated during his presidency but, in his final years, represented only a sliver of his income. In 2020, Trump reported no charitable donations in any respect. In 2019 and 2018 he reported writing checks for about $500,000 in donations. In earlier years the numbers were higher — $1.8 million in 2017 and $1.1 million in 2016.
It’s unclear whether the reported sums included Trump’s $400,000 annual presidential salary, which he had said he would forgo and said he had donated to varied federal departments.
While Trump has long claimed that being president cost him tens of millions of dollars, the filings show that his election technically gave Trump a raise by some measures. His wages increased from about $14,000 in 2015 to $373,000 in 2017, the filings show.
In a press release Friday, Trump said Democrats “never must have done it,” referring to the discharge.
“It’s going to steer to horrible things for thus many individuals,” he said. “The novel, left Democrats have weaponized all the pieces, but remember, that could be a dangerous two-way street!”
He said the returns demonstrated “how proudly successful I even have been and the way I even have been in a position to use depreciation and various other tax deductions’ to construct his businesses.
Presiding over a routine pro forma session of the House on Friday, Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said great care had been taken to make sure the returns were treated with sensitivity, with personal and other identifying information redacted.
“We’ve been attempting to be very careful to ensure that that we weren’t ‘weaponizing’ the IRS returns,” said Beyer, D-Va. He is also a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, which held a celebration line vote last week to make the returns public.
The returns show how Trump used tax law to attenuate his liability.
For 2020, greater than 150 of Trump’s business entities listed negative qualified business income, which the IRS defines as “the online amount of qualified items of income, gain, deduction and loss from any qualified trade or business.” In total for that tax 12 months, combined with nearly $9 million in carryforward loss from previous years, Trump’s qualified losses amounted to greater than $58 million for the ultimate 12 months of his term in office.
Points of Trump’s funds had been shrouded in mystery since his days as an up-and-coming Manhattan real estate developer within the Nineteen Eighties.
Trump, known for constructing skyscrapers and hosting a reality TV show before winning the White House, did provide limited details about his holdings and income on mandatory disclosure forms. He has promoted his wealth within the annual financial statements he provides to banks to secure loans and to financial magazines to justify his place on rankings of the world’s billionaires.
Trump’s longtime accounting firm has since disavowed the statements, and Latest York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging Trump and his Trump Organization fraudulently inflated asset values on the statements. Trump and his company have denied wrongdoing.
In October 2018, The Latest York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series based on leaked tax records that contradicted the image Trump had tried to sell of himself as a self-made businessman. It showed that Trump received a modern-day equivalent of not less than $413 million from his father’s real estate holdings, with much of that cash coming from what the Times called “tax dodges” within the Nineties.
A second series in 2020 showed that Trump paid no income taxes in any respect in 10 of the previous 15 years because he generally lost more cash than he made.
In its report last week, the Ways and Means Committee indicated the Trump administration could have disregarded a requirement mandating audits of a president’s tax filings.
The IRS only began to audit Trump’s 2016 tax filings on April 3, 2019 — greater than two years into his presidency — when the Ways and Means chairman, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., asked the agency for information related to the tax returns.
The Joint Committee on Taxation report raised multiple red flags about facets of Trump’s tax filings, including his carryover losses, deductions tied to conservation and charitable donations, and loans to his children that could possibly be taxable gifts.
Every president and major-party candidate since Richard Nixon has voluntarily made not less than summaries of their tax information available to the general public. Trump bucked that trend as a candidate and as president, repeatedly asserting that his taxes were “under audit” and couldn’t be released.
The Trump Organization was convicted earlier this month on tax fraud charges for helping some executives dodge taxes on company-paid perks corresponding to apartments and luxury cars.
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Associated Press writers Paul Wiseman and Farnoush Amiri in Washington, Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
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