Dem
51
GOP
49
Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has the past six years of Donald Trump's tax returns. Yesterday he convened the panel at 3 p.m. to discuss what to do with them, since Democratic control of the committee will soon be at an end (for at least 2 years). The options varied from keep everything a complete secret to publishing all of them verbatim on the Committee's website. The discussion was expected to be—how shall we put this—spirited, so after a short photo op, Neal told all the reporters and photographers to leave so the Committee could do it work in private.
There has been endless speculation on why Trump has tried so hard to keep his tax returns secret. Some people have speculated that he isn't actually a billionaire at all, but only a middling millionaire at most. Or worse yet, that he is an extremely bad businessman and almost never makes money on his businesses. Others have speculated that he has loans from Russian banks, deducts the interest he pays to them, and is deeply in hock to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is also possible that he does things that are borderline illegal.
After Neal and his Committee had their... discussion, they voted on the matter, with all the Democrats voting to release the returns and all the Republicans voting to keep them secret. The Democrats are in the majority, of course, so they win. As with the 1/6 Committee documents (see above), there will have to be some redactions (e.g., blacking out Social Security numbers), so the returns aren't available quite yet. That will happen later this week. For now, the Committee has released a 39-page report summarizing, in effect, the top-level numbers from the returns.
Based on what is in the report, those who hoped that the returns would be very damning are going to be disappointed. The main takeaway is that Trump rarely pays much in taxes, often less than $1,000. That is hardly a revelation. The New York Times got ahold of some of Trump's older tax returns in 2020 and reported that he had vast write-offs that wiped out nearly all of his tax bills.
While the Times' article summarized some general aspects of Trump's tax situation, it provided far less information than would just publishing the literal tax returns, something the Times didn't do for legal reasons. So, maybe the release of the returns will reveal something new and very damaging. But we are inclined to doubt it. If there was something really bad in there, presumably Neal would have put it into the preliminary report. But beyond the low tax bill, the only other "revelation" in the report is that the IRS failed to audit Trump until 2019. That means that the IRS failed to do its legally mandated job, and that Trump was lying about being unable to release his returns because he was under audit. The former revelation is bad for the IRS, but has little to do with Trump. And as to the latter revelation, well, anyone who didn't know that Trump was lying has had their head in a hole approximately 30,000 times in the last 6 years. (Z)