"What Is Trump So Afraid People Will See In His Tax Returns?" David Leonhardt, New York Times

What Is Trump So Afraid People Will See In His Tax Returns?

David Leonhardt
New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist House Democrats may not be able to force President Trump to release his tax returns. But the Democrats can keep reminding Americans that Trump really does not want the public to know what’s in those returns. As you probably know by now, all other recent presidents (and presidential nominees) voluntarily released their tax information. Trump has not. Now House Democrats are trying to get access to that information and potentially release portions of it to the public. Last week, Richard Neal, Democrat of Massachussets and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, demanded to see six years of Trump’s tax returns, citing a 1924 provision in the tax code that gives Congress the power to obtain any citizen’s returns. Neal has given the Internal Revenue Service until Wednesday to hand over the returns to Congress. Trump has repeatedly said that he would be happy to release his returns publicly, but that’s clearly been a lie. One of his excuses has been the false claim that he can’t release them because he is being audited by the I.R.S. And over the weekend, his administration stopped pretending Trump was telling the truth. Democrats will “never” see them, said Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on Fox News yesterday. “Nor should they.” Trump’s lawyers have said they will fight the request. Why is Trump so afraid of letting people see his tax returns? The most innocent possibility is that he isn’t nearly as wealthy as he has long boasted, and he’s embarrassed by the truth. A less innocent possibility is that he has financial ties that could create political problems for him if those ties became public — for example, ties to Russia or other countries to which his foreign policy has been suspiciously friendly. The release of the returns would let “Americans decide whether the president is making decisions that benefit his businesses at the expense of American taxpayers,” Aaron Scherb of Common Cause, the government watchdog group, has written in USA Today. “If Trump has significant debt to banks and/or individuals in certain countries, some of which might be adversaries of the United States, we must know because his foreign policy decisions might be compromised.” Seeing the president’s tax returns isn’t a matter of prurient gossip or mere partisan politics. It’s a matter of national interest. So long as Trump is fighting the release, Democrats should keep talking about it.

For more … “I don’t see how the pres­ident can mount any cred­i­ble de­fense on this,” Steve Rosen­thal, a senior­ fel­low at the Tax Pol­icy Cen­ter, told The Wall Street Journal, referring to Neal’s request. “I sure don’t see any le­git­i­mate grounds for the pres­i­dent to refuse, es­pe­cially a re­quest that’s been so care­fully con­structed on over­sight re­spon­si­bil­ity.” Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien — one of the few journalists who’s seen some of Trump’s tax returns, after Trump sued O’Brien over a book years ago — argues that Neal’s request doesn’t go far enough. “Some of the transactions that may interest investigators the most took place around 15 years ago, when Trump, suddenly flush with cash, went on a shopping spree,” O’Brien writes. “It is still curious to me how Trump, who always used to finance his transactions with debt, raised the funds to do all that in the mid-2000s and pay cash.” Separately, legislators in New York State are trying to obtain Trump’s state tax returns which “likely contain much of the same financial information as a federal return,” Jesse McKinley of The Times writes. In a February Quinnipiac University poll, 67 percent of American voters said Trump should publicly release his tax returns (versus 24 percent who said he shouldn’t).