After a multiyear legal process, six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns have been publicly released by the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives.
The committee voted to provide the financial information on December 30, with Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) claiming that the release served as a check on the power of the executive branch of the government.
“A president is no ordinary taxpayer. They hold power and influence unlike any other American,” Neal suggested. “And with great power comes even greater responsibility.”
The documents, including personal and business returns from 2015 to 2020, contained almost 6,000 pages of tax information. Prior to his successful presidential campaign in 2016, Trump had bank accounts in several foreign countries, including Britain, Ireland, and China.
Overall, from 2015 to 2020, Trump lost over $53 million and paid more than $1.7 million in taxes.
The committee originally requested the returns in 2019, triggering a legal battle. After lower courts ruled in favor of releasing the tax returns, Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.
However, the Court permitted the former president’s returns to be given to Congress in November, as reported by The Dallas Express. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in compliance with the Court’s order, then provided the documents to the Ways and Means Committee.
Trump responded to the news with a statement on Truth Social, suggesting, “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.”
“The great USA divide will now grow far left,” he continued. “The Radical Left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street.”
Addressing some comments that claimed the tax returns showed Trump was a bad businessman, the former president wrote that the returns “once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”
The Ways and Means Committee also released a report on the mandatory audits the IRS was supposed to have conducted on President Trump’s taxes during his tenure in office. The report suggested that the IRS did not provide the program the resources necessary to adequately examine Trump’s taxes, considering the scope of his investments and business dealings.
“We anticipated the IRS would expand the mandatory audit program to account for the complex nature of the form president’s financial situation yet found no evidence of that,” Chairman Neal explained. “This is a major failure of the IRS under the prior administration, and certainly not what we had hoped to find.”