Tax returns of Donald Trump
[9][10][11][c] After Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2018, Trump sued to prevent his returns from being released by the IRS or his accountants, which were being sought by certain state officials and congressional committees.
[12][13][14] In May 2019, Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal requested six years of Trump's tax records;[15] after appeals were exhausted, he received the documents on November 30, 2022.
[36] In 2012, Trump sought to have Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's tax returns released on April 1, which "historically is the time that everybody gives them".
"[48] John Fund of National Review feared that the returns contained an electoral "time bomb" and called upon Republican convention delegates to abstain from voting for Trump if he did not release the information.
[51] In 2016, The Washington Post reported a prior audit of Trump's tax returns for 2002 through 2008 by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which was "closed administratively by agreement with the I.R.S.
[58] In March 2017, journalist David Cay Johnston obtained the first two pages of Trump's 2005 federal income tax returns, which were given to Rachel Maddow and shown on MSNBC.
[4] In 2018, the New York Times investigation into the finances of Fred and Donald Trump revealed that despite the claims of the latter to be a self-made billionaire, he had actually received more than $400 million (in 2018 dollars) from his father, most of it in ways that avoided paying gift or inheritance tax.
[68][69][70] On April 3, 2019, the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Congressman Richard Neal, formally requested IRS commissioner Charles P. Rettig to provide six years (2013 through 2018) of Trump's returns.
[15] On July 30, 2021, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel wrote an opinion concluding that the committee's request was legitimate and the IRS must provide the information sought,[80][81] but on August 4, Trump's legal team opined that the committee should stop investigating Trump's affairs, arguing that Neal's "requests have always been a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics and speech.
[93][94] On May 6, 2019, after weeks of delay, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sent a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chair Neal, asserting that the subpoena lacked "a legitimate legislative purpose" and that "the department may not lawfully fulfill the committee's request," although the IRS had released Richard Nixon's tax returns the same day Congress requested them in 1973.
[96][97][98][99] Neal criticized the administration's position, saying that its objections "lack merit" and "judicial precedent commands that none of the concerns raised can legitimately be used to deny the committee's request.
[108][109] On May 7, 2019, The New York Times revealed that it had acquired information about Trump's tax returns showing more than a billion dollars in business losses with a decade in the red.
[110][111] On July 29, 2019, a career IRS official filed a whistleblower complaint with the House Ways and Means Committee, Senate Finance Committee, and Treasury inspector general for tax administration, stating that at least one Treasury Department official had inappropriately interfered in the audit process for the tax returns of the president and vice president,[112] which takes place annually in accordance with IRS policy.
[22] The possibility that political appointees interfered with audits conducted by career civil servants alarmed former IRS officials and legal experts.
[112] However, Representative Richard Neal, the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in September 2019 that he was consulting legal counsel on whether the whistleblower's complaint could be publicly released.
[113] The whistleblower's report was referred to by Neal and other House Democrats in the federal lawsuit regarding Trump's refusal to comply with a House Ways and Means Committee subpoena for the returns; in a filing, Neal wrote that the whistleblower's complaint presents credible evidence of potential inappropriate efforts to influence "the mandatory audit program" and raises "serious and urgent concerns", thereby bolstering the committee's case for obtaining the tax returns.
[93] The IRS refusal to provide the records sought was based on an opinion of Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel dated June 2019 which argued that the House lacked a "legitimate legislative purpose" to warrant receiving the information.
[81] On July 2, 2019, the committee sued Mnuchin and IRS commissioner Charles Rettig to enforce the subpoena and obtain six years of Trump's tax returns.
[121] On July 30, Acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel Dawn Johnsen wrote an opinion stating that the Treasury Department must turn over Trump's tax returns to the committee, stating that the committee had "invoked sufficient reasons" to request the tax information, reversing Engel's June 2019 opinion.
[82] Judge McFadden dismissed the case in December 2021, allowing the returns to be released to the committee, stating Trump was "wrong on the law" and that Congress is due "great deference" in its inquiries.
[139] Citing grand jury secrecy rules, the district attorney did not reveal the scope of the investigation, but in court filings prosecutors stated that publicly available evidence regarding the conduct of Trump and his businesses would justify a grand jury investigation into tax fraud and financial crimes such as insurance fraud, falsification of business records, and other crimes.
[12] In court filings in September 2019, New York prosecutors rejected Trump's claim of "sweeping immunity" from a criminal probe while he is in office, writing that Trump was "seeking to invent and enforce a new presidential 'tax return privilege', on the theory that disclosing information in a tax return will necessarily reveal information that will somehow impede the functioning of a President, sufficiently to meet the test of irreparable harm.
In a 75-page opinion, the court called Trump's contention an overreach of executive power that is "repugnant to the nation's governmental structure and constitutional values".
"[148] Trump subsequently filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court, asserting that the grand-jury subpoena directed to him violates Article II and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
[149][151] On July 9, 2020, the Supreme Court issued its 7–2 ruling, holding (in an opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.) that "Article II and the supremacy clause of the Constitution do not categorically preclude, or require a heightened standard for, the issuance of a state criminal subpoena to a sitting president.
[162][163] By March 19, 2021, Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had met eight times with investigators for the Manhattan district attorney to cooperate with their inquiry.
[174] House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump's indebtedness raises concerns about national security, since it represents "over $400 million in leverage that somebody has over the president" and it was not known to whom the debt is owed.
[178] The Daily News separately argued that the returns "show that Trump is a proven liar", specifically claiming that in both 2014 and 2015 he was erroneously awarded $300 for a New York school property tax exemption, which is only for people with a federal adjusted gross income (AGI) under $500,000.
[179] In May 2024, The New York Times and ProPublica revealed that Trump improperly used tax breaks relating to his skyscraper in Chicago, claiming in 2010 that the transfer of funds into a partnership constituted a $168 million loss.
[180] In January 2017, an online petition on the "We the People" portion of the White House's website calling for the release of Trump's tax returns was set up.
