Prior to 2016, it was customary for presidential candidates to release their tax returns, allowing voters and media to assess a candidate’s possible conflicts of interest and, of course, how much in taxes they actually end up paying.
Trump himself promised to do the same before he was elected. “It’ll be released,” he said six years ago.
But Trump never did that.
According to reporting by The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, the former president manufactured an excuse with the specific intent of not fulfilling that promise: that he is facing an IRS audit. However, he didn’t release returns even for those years not under IRS review and fought Democratic attempts to compel their disclosure, culminating in a November 2022 ruling by the Supreme Court that rejected his effort to block the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining them.
Despite Trump’s efforts through the years, some of his previous tax returns had already been made public. In 2021, The New York Times obtained more than two decades’ worth of tax returns for Trump and his businesses, revealing that the former president had not paid any federal income taxes on at least 11 occasions.
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