Donald Trump.Photo: The White House
The tax documents, which span the years 2015 through 2020 and are thousands of pages long, show that Trump claimed large losses throughout his presidency as a means of reducing his tax burden, carrying over a $105 million loss in 2015 and a $73 million loss in 2016.
As the committee noted in an earlier report, Trump paid $1.1 million in federal income taxes in his first three years as president, “before paying no tax as his income dwindled and losses once again mounted in 2020.” That year, Trump reported a loss of $4.8 million.
In a statement posted to his social media site, Trump 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.”
But Democrats on the House committee have said they want to examine the returns to investigate any possible conflicts of interest that could arise for a president.
Democratic Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, first sought the tax returns from the IRS in 2019, while Trump was still in office.
When the agency said it would not hand over the returns, the Ways and Means Committee sued the IRS, Treasury Department and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin,CNBC reports.
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Trump, meanwhile, in his statement on Truth Social, said the Democratically-led committee “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.”
source: people.com
