After a lengthy legal battle, former President Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, The Daily Caller reports.
Chairman Richard Neal had requested the un-redacted returns from 2015 to 2020 be released as part of an investigation into whether Trump violated the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by accepting payments from foreign governments during his time in office.
The request was made under the authority of section 6103 of the U.S. tax code and will also examine whether Trump’s taxes were properly audited by the IRS’s mandatory auditing system for U.S. presidents.
The committee first subpoenaed the documents in 2019 following the testimony of Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, who claimed that Trump had misrepresented his net worth to Cohen’s accounting firm, Mazars USA.
Neal requested returns, audit information, and administrative files from the IRS for tax years 2013 to 2018.
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals approved the committee’s request to retrieve the returns from the IRS, but Trump filed an emergency application to block the committee’s review of his returns.
However, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump in November, allowing the committee to review the returns.
The Treasury Department subsequently handed over the tax returns to the committee in compliance with court orders.
According to the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation, Trump paid only $750 in income tax in 2017 and none in 2020, although he paid $1.1 million in federal income taxes in 2018 and 2019.
In a campaign video posted on Truth Social on December 23, Trump accused Democrats of “illegally” obtaining his personal information and called the process “unconstitutional” and a “deranged political witch hunt.”
Trump stated, “The radical Democrats’ behavior is a shame upon the U.S. Congress. This precedent must now be applied to the corrupt Democrats themselves. The new Republican House should immediately obtain the financial records of [President] Joe Biden and his entire political enterprise because that’s exactly what it is.”
