WASHINGTON – US lawmakers were set to vote yesterday on whether to make public Donald Trump’s tax returns, ending a years-long battle by the former president to keep the filings private as his cloudy financial past continues to stoke controversy.
The Republican leader – who is running for the White House again after losing the 2020 election – broke with presidential tradition by refusing to release the records, triggering feverish speculation about what they might contain.
The Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee will vote behind closed doors to release six years of the billionaire’s filings – one of its last actions before the reins are handed to the Republicans in January.
The vote comes after committee chairman Richard Neal won access to the documents, covering 2015 to 2020, at the end of a protracted legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Only a small, select group of lawmakers have seen the returns, which remain subject to privacy laws that make it a felony for anyone to leak details.
The law allows legislators with responsibility over taxation to examine the returns of any American taxpayer, however.
Trump’s finances have always been of immense interest to the US public, in part due to the lengths to which he has gone to keep them private, and also because of his lavish pre-White House lifestyle as a property mogul.
The returns could show how much he has given to charity, if he has foreign business interests or other conflicts of interest, and details of any deductions he has received.
‘Greed and cheating’
Trump’s family business was convicted of tax fraud by a New York jury earlier this month, in a case Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg said was “about greed and cheating”.
Trump himself was not charged but the company and a separate Trump family entity were convicted of running a 13-year scheme to defraud and evade taxes by falsifying business records.
The New York Times published an investigation of Trump’s finances in 2020 alleging that he paid little or no federal income tax for years before he came to power.
Democrats jumped on the allegations, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying it showed “Trump’s disdain for America’s working families”.
Trump immediately dismissed the accusations as “totally fake news”.
The Ways and Means Committee Republicans warned ahead of yesterday’s vote that releasing the returns could set a precedent eroding privacy for everyday Americans and enabling unwarranted investigations of political opponents.
“Democrats will open the door for partisans in Congress to have nearly unlimited power to target political enemies by obtaining and making public their private tax returns,” the panel’s top Republican Kevin Brady said in a statement.
Republicans have argued that the Democrats’ stated purpose for examining the returns – to aid a review of the Internal Revenue Service’s methods for auditing presidents – is disingenuous.
“While Democrats insist it’s not political, their rush to release the returns through a hurried, botched process signifies that their motivations are indeed politicised,” they said in a statement.
No timetable has been given for any release but the Democrats have not publicly ruled out making the records public immediately after the vote. – AFP, December 21, 2022
