After a six-year battle with Congressional Democrats, former President Donald Trump’s tax returns have been made public.
On Friday, hundreds of pages of Trump’s personal and business tax records were released.
The move was announced on Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee, whose Democratic leaders had been pushing for the release for years.
Trump’s returns were entered into the congressional record during a special House pro forma session at 9 a.m. The panel, through which Democrats had waged a three-year legal saga to obtain and release Trump’s financial documents, also made a formal announcement.
The release of the former president’s returns took place after the panel alleged last week that the IRS failed to audit Trump’s taxes in a timely manner while he was in the White House.
- “The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies,” Committee chair Richard Neal (D-MA) said in a statement.
“We anticipated the IRS would expand the mandatory audit program to account for the complex nature of the former president’s financial situation yet found no evidence of that. This is a major failure of the IRS under the prior administration, and certainly not what we had hoped to find.”
Trump responded to the release on Friday, warning that it will lead to the partisan divide in the US becoming “far worse.”
“The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people,” he said in a statement.
- Committee member Don Beyer (D-VA) said on Friday that the release was necessitated because Trump “abused the power of his office to block basic transparency on his finances and conflicts of interest which no president since Nixon has foregone.”
The tax documents range from 2015 to 2020, including Trump’s presidential campaign through his time in office.
They include personal and business financial records, giving the public insight into Trump’s income for the first time.
Source: Arutz Sheva