Well, you know, norms and all.
The guy was the President. We, the People, had a historical expectation to review his taxes. As well as those of future Presidential candidates.
That has now been corrected. Thank you.
Yes, and apparently that is why the committee also asked for information on the IRS audits, and how the enforcement compared to other cases. Particularly what the IRS did (or didn’t do) before and after Trump became President.
Did he get preferential treatment from the IRS? This is the info requested by the committee.
Release the taxes! Is that the new word for kraken?
I’m hearing that the taxes weren’t under audit at all. If I can provide a cite…
Here:
Also:
“No supporting documentation for information within the returns”
… combined with…
“No audit”
… seems the IRS hasn’t exactly done its job here. Or I’m misreading something (also likely).
I’m hearing (cnn) that they are releasing everything. This should be very interesting.
Before you get on the IRS too hard, remember who oversaw them during the Trump years: Steve Mnuchin.
It’s probably more accurate to say the IRS was restrained from doing their work on orders of their boss. Mnuchin should be investigated for why he failed to comply with the letter of the law.
They are moving fast, a summary report is due to release in minutes. I wonder if it will be as big as the Jan 6 summary…
I think you are forgetting the dynamic where bad publicity can help TFG.
The idea tax returns should be private is more popular than Donald Trump is. So release will, in the medium to long term, help Trump politically among low-information voters who value privacy. I only hope that Trump is past his sell-by date, in which case handing him this gift won’t matter.
As for whether it is just and fair to release them, Yes.
P.S. What would have hurt him politically is if he had released them himself. Then the focus would be on how little he paid, not on claims of being a victim of the Democrats.
The “why” there is easy: To shelter Trump.
(Mnuchin, not even grinning yet somehow displaying both rows of his teeth, “I’m a Trump guy.”)
Dealing with business and personal returns almost every day at work, I don’t think his personal returns will have much if anything interesting in them in terms of who might be funding him or whatever. Hell, his business returns probably won’t have anything interesting in them, because generally all that’s reported is categories of expenses, and those categories generally aren’t very detailed. It would take someone auditing him to even determine whether they are representative of reality, and there’s reason to believe that anything that wasn’t reported to the IRS wasn’t mentioned on the returns as income.
The best you’re going to do is get a long list of entities that he owns part of, and see how much income those entities reported on their K-1s to him. If they’re all the businesses he’s known to own, that won’t be anything new. The only thing we’re going to be seeing is just how much income all his businesses are claiming to be making. It’s possible that he’s a sole member of LLCs he owns and as such all the activity will be reported on a Schedules C, D or E, but all that means is you might get some property names as well as what he claims he paid for things and how little rent he claims to collect. I guess if properties show up that you’re not expecting that might be interesting.
OMG. They should have been doing that the last few days so there would be no gap between tonight’s announcement and actual release.
During the next few days, there will be a debate over whether tax privacy is sacred, without having the counter-narrative of how little in taxes TFG has paid the last six years. Swing voters will have their minds made up at a time when the GOP narrative is at its strongest. Sound like Democratic political malpractice.
Lol. Sure, Jan.
Anyway, here it is:
Scroll down to find the ES, summaries, and exhibits.
Looking at the figures I am reminded of John Rockefeller’s exclamation when he heard that JP Morgan’s estate was worth around $30 million: “He owned all of us, and he wasn’t even rich?”
No audit, huh. Interesting.
But huge audits on comey and McCabe… interesting. Although there is reporting that the audits on the two men was just coincidence.
By that logic, there should have never been any hearings, either. Those also occurred to inform the public of Trump’s crimes. When dealing with issues of national importance, you have to get the populace on board. The whole point of releasing information is to prove it’s not political, but to show he actually did those things.
The Constitution gave Congress investigative powers for a reason. And that reason is not to help out the executive or judicial branches. It is because they are the representatives of the people. They wouldn’t have the power to make these investigations public if there wasn’t utility in doing so.
If the public isn’t on board, not even conviction makes the underlying issue go away. It turns him into a political martyr. It leads to the public thinking the judicial branch is corrupt. Part of government’s role is to get the consent of the people.
Sadly, today’s Republican party’s number one plank seems to be that TFG is, in fact, a political martyr. How I wish that the evidence would be accepted for what it is: a damning indictment of the worst president in our history and that would spell the end of that party.
I hope they run on a total platform of “boo hoo, Trump is being picked on” and nothing else whatsoever.
Boo Hoo, Loser Trump cries like a baby" is such a winning strategy.
Here’s one reason why the returns are being made public. The IRS has an internal policy that the individual returns of the President and Vice-president will be audited annually.
For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the IRS did not conduct those audits. They only started the audits when the Ways and Means committee requested the returns, and it doesn’t look like they did very much after that.
Why didn’t the IRS comply with its own internal policy on this point? Who got to them?
There are now proposals to take that policy and enact it as law. That is exactly what congressional investigations are meant for: to investigate how the law is being administered and whether legislative changes are necessary, for better enforcement.
Releasing the returns informs the public debate on this issue.
Finding out if the IRS was following the law was the legislative purpose outlined in the original request.
Shouldn’t the IRS have a paper trail? Someone first reviews a return, files a provisional “audit or no audit” memo, that is responded to by a higher-up if reconsideration is requested, etc.
Or do you think “Nobody knows who made the call, and the call about the call” is going to fly?