To slightly dampen the enthusiasm of the teeming millions, it should be pointed out that just because Congress gets to look at the returns doesn’t mean we get to. I’m not a lawyer but reading over the statue that was linked to above, it appears that it is required to be released in a closed door session and it is illegal for any employee of officer of the US government (which as assume includes members of congress) to reveal them or any of the information contained inside.
Of course that doesn’t mean that they can’t use the information there in to ask further questions that might be made public, say for example subpoena Deutsche Bank and ask whether or not there might not have been a loan paid off on say November 21st 2016, and where the money to pay it off came from.
Well, I myself am concerned for all those future presidents who refuse to show their returns and provide bullshit reasons for not doing so while demonstrating repeated and clear indications of conflict of interest and acceptance of emoluments. Who’s thinking of them?
I want the public to see the Mueller Report. I don’t really care if the public gets to see the tax returns. I want the Democrats in the House to see those.
Looks like the head of the IRS, Charles Rettig, is just “some guy” that was already part of the upper-level IRS apparatus, with no particular connection to Trump and probably no strong job prospect worries. So unless he’s a surprise MAGA-hat, I imagine that the most he’ll do is plead a labor shortage and tell them that it will take a few weeks to scrounge the documents up.
I would expect the principal angle for defense, if Trump chooses to fight it, would be to plead unconstitutionality. For example, he could take the Roe v. Wade defense and say that his tax returns should be private on the basis of the penumbra of privacy enshrined into the Bill of Rights. But I assume that there are any other number of angles he could take, given that he is aware of the request and lives in a country where you can take pretty much anything whatsoever to court and, given that he’s the President, it would be unlikely that the court would decide that the argument was too stupid to allow to proceed to trial.
Though, whether Trump will fight it or not…who knows? On the one hand, he’s already had the FBI go through all of it and take everything that there possibly is to take to convict him of criminal activities out and note it down. At this point, he’s already boned in every way that really matters. But, Trump probably fears embarrassment more than he fears jail, so the big question will be: Just how embarrassing are the numbers in his returns? How much debt is he in?
The most sensible way to fight it would be to argue that it’s unconstitutional, either under the “penumbra of privacy” or self-incrimination grounds.
But this is Trump we’re talking about. When he fights it, it’s probably going to be on grounds of executive privilege, which in his mind means “Trump gets to do whatever he wants”.
Given that Trump was able to get away without paying taxes, due to having gone bankrupt, I presume that there’s somewhere in there that you’re able to scribble a debt or two in.
Hell, once you’ve figured out that you can go tax free for a decade after a bankruptcy, it might make sense to take yourself bankrupt every decade or so. Overspend to some fake businesses until you’re out of money and then, after bankruptcy proceedings, turn around and have those businesses come back to you as some big customers.
He seems to be a 35 year Beverly Hills tax attorney who was on some advisory boards for the California FTB and the iRS but not an ‘upper-level’ IRS employee until named by Trump.
“In 2010–2011, Rettig was appointed by the IRS to serve as Chairman of the IRS Advisory Council (IRSAC) for the last year of his three-year term.”
Which, actually is not correct. He was on the IRSAC from 2008 to 2011. He was the chairman of the council for the last year.
Were all the “donations” of the Trump Foundation made public? Where did the “$7 to Boy Scouts” info come from? That is my go-to example of how petty this criminal family is.
Even if it does apply to members of Congress, that isn’t absolute due to the speech or debate clause. It might be illegal for a member of Congress to release the returns to the press, but nothing said during an official proceeding can be a crime.
Heh, nice goalpost move: First you cast doubt on whether it “has been used before”, and then when you’re shown that it has, you modify your claim to “has never been used this way” (emphasis added).
And as other posters have pointed out, the reason that this particular law has never been invoked before specifically to request Presidential or even Presidential-candidate tax returns is that for the past several decades, Presidents and Presidential candidates have voluntarily released their tax returns.
As I pointed out, there is nothing new about invoking Section 6103(f) to request tax data about non-politicians. The only new thing here is invoking it specifically to request the tax returns of a sitting President. And the only reason that’s new is that no previous President in the last 40 years has been enough of a shameless grifter to try to hide his tax returns from the public in the first place.
So no, the only one missing the point here is you.
Right. One primary purpose of the law was to have recourse to deal with a corrupt president. Now that we have corrupt president, they want to stick their heads in the sand. Trump isn’t the only shameless one.