Washington, (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – The tycoon paid $1.1 million in federal taxes in his first three years as president, and no tax in 2020. Days before the House of Representatives passes into the hands of the Republicans, a commission controlled by the Democrats has released the tax returns for six years of former President Donald Trump. The publication of the records, edited, puts an end to a long legal battle between the Republican to prevent them from seeing the light, but not the controversy surrounding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), unable to accurately scrutinize the tycoon’s turnover while occupying the presidency. The revelation adds another step to Trump’s file after announcing his intention to attend the elections in 2024.
According to data released this Friday, Trump paid $1.1 million (just over a million euros) in federal income taxes in his first three years as president, and nothing in 2020, when his income began to decline. Once in the White House, the tycoon gave his eldest children the reins of the family emporium, the Trump Organization, which, according to records, had an adjusted gross income of 15.8 million dollars in his first three years as president. In the two years prior to his arrival at the White House, the Republican recorded large business losses, according to the records of fiscal years between 2015 and 2020.
The former president has attacked the Democrats and the Supreme Court through a message on his social network, Truth Social, picked up by the news portal The Hill. “The Democrats should never have done it. The Supreme Court should never have passed it and it will lead to horrible things for many people. The great division of the United States is going to be much worse,” Trump said. “Tax returns show once again how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use amortization and other tax deductions as an incentive to create thousands of jobs and magnificent companies,” he added.
Until the decision of the Supreme Court, which last month expedited the delivery of Trump’s statements from 2015 to 2020, the work of the Committee on Media and Arbitration of the House of Representatives, chaired by Democrat Richard Neal, had been a continuous setback since 2019. The Republican judicially toured all possible instances to prevent them from seeing the light, with arguments as pilgrims as that the size of the business of his real estate emporium prevented him from evaluating them and accountable. A similar argument was used to explain the myopia of the IRS, which could not fully audit him during his term of office, despite the fact that the committee approved a law that would oblige the Treasury to complete face-to-face audits within 90 days of the inauguration.
“A president is not an ordinary taxpayer. It has power and influence unlike any other American citizen. That great power implies an even greater responsibility,” Richard Neal said in a statement.
After coming out of two impeachments to which he was subjected by the House of Representatives, Donald Trump, 76, faces a complicated legal offensive that can tarnish his political future or, vice versa, give wings to his most extremist supporters. The congressional committee that investigated the assault on the Capitol has asked to prosecute Trump for four crimes, including obstruction of justice and insurrection. The FBI requisitioned confidential documents that the Republican had taken from the White House, and two ongoing investigations in New York, one civil and one criminal, analyze their business for alleged tax fraud.
The Media and Arbitration Committee of the House of Representatives requested the statements in 2019, arguing that Congress needed them to evaluate the IRS audit of the presidents’ tax statements, a purpose that Republicans considered to be politically motivated. Trump, who took office in January 2017, was the first presidential candidate since the 1970s not to make his taxes public. He sued the committee to try to keep them private, but the high court, with a conservative majority, ruled against him.
In 2016, when he was still a candidate for the presidency, the tycoon pointed out the scale and complexity of his finances as a reason to defy the tradition, followed by all the candidates to occupy the White House, of religiously publishing his tax returns. “They are not like a normal tax return,” he said in a television interview. During the next seven years, the Republican has also resisted making them public, first, as he pretexted, by an “invasive” audit of the IRS motivated precisely by its refusal to publish them; then, since 2019, in response to the initiative of the House committee.
Records show that Trump’s income and tax obligations fluctuated drastically from 2015 to 2020, during his presidential campaign and his subsequent term. They show that Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, benefited from large deductions, argued losses and paid little or no income tax in part of that period. In 2016, the year he won the election, and 2017, the first in the White House, the Republican paid $750 in federal taxes, according to a 20-year tax investigation published by The New York Times in September 2020, two months before the election. The exclusive showed that he had not paid income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because from 2011 to 2018 he declared to lose more money than he received.
