Six years’ worth of former US President Donald Trump tax returns were made public on Friday by a committee of the House of Representatives under Democratic leadership, in a remarkable step made just days before Republicans are scheduled to assume control of the chamber.
The release of Trump’s redacted tax returns for the years 2015 through 2020 brings to an end a multi-year legal dispute that the US Supreme Court just resolved last month between the Republican former president and Democratic lawmakers.
The 76-year-old Trump, who was twice impeached by the Democratic-controlled House before being cleared both times by the US Senate, is now dealing with a number of legal issues as he prepares to run for reelection in 2024.
The House committee looking into his followers’ attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 has recommended federal prosecutors to charge him with four crimes, including obstruction and insurrection for his part in the tragic riot, earlier this month.
Richard Neal, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, made the request for the returns in 2019. He claimed that Congress need them to decide whether or not legislation addressing presidential tax returns was necessary.
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Republicans expressed concern that the move may transform personal tax returns into a political weapon and warned that party members who take over the panel next month may feel forced to use the same strategy against prominent Democrats.
Trump, who took office in 2017, was the first nominee in decades to withhold his tax returns. He sued the committee in effort to keep them secret, but the committee won case in the US Supreme Court.
The Internal Revenue Service disregarded its own standards by failing to audit Trump for three of his four years as president, the committee concluded in a report released last week after studying the papers. Trump did not pay income tax in 2020, his final full year in office, despite making millions from his vast commercial empire, according to information previously made public by the panel.
Trump’s income and tax obligations changed significantly between 2015 and 2020, during his first run for president and the succeeding period in office, according to the data. They demonstrate that during several of those years, Trump and his wife Melania Trump claimed significant losses and deductions while paying little to no income tax.
Given that Republicans would assume control of the House on Tuesday after gaining a narrow majority in the midterm elections in November, Democrats had a short window to figure out how to handle the returns once they had them.
A bill mandating that the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service complete audits of presidents’ tax files within 90 days of their inaugurations was enacted by the Democratic-controlled House before it adjourned for the winter break.
