YORK: What happened to Trump’s tax fury | Community alert
On Dec. 30, as Washington shut down for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and Republicans prepared to take over the House, Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released copies of former President Donald Trump’s letters. tax declarations 2015-2020.
Democratic lawmakers had fought for years to get the documents. They claimed that they did not need them for partisan political reasons, but to be able to control the Internal Revenue Service more effectively. The “legislative intent” argument was always a joke; everyone knew that when they got the returns, the Democrats would release them to the public, hoping to start a wave of negative stories about Trump. And that’s exactly what they did.
Now that the returns are public, it’s worth remembering the years of anticipation and sensational theorizing that defined the effort to untangle Trump’s tax records. The combined forces of the Resistance, the Democratic Party, and assorted NeverTrumpers began a long campaign with heavy breathing about what deep, dark secrets might be lurking in the return.
There are many examples, but only one: Trump traveled to Helsinki in July 2018, where he met Russian President Vladimir Putin. At a joint news conference, Trump refused to accept the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 US election. It was a terrifying moment; At the time, investigators ranging from former Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to former Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller had concluded that Russia was indeed trying to interfere. It’s just a fact.
But of course Trump’s opponents—the Resistance-Democrats-NeverTrumper crowd—had taken the story a step further to accuse Trump of colluding with Russia. That’s what the Mueller investigation was all about. And after a long investigation, Mueller was never able to establish that collusion even took place, much less who might have been involved. Trump was unfairly accused, and he held an eternal grudge against it. In Helsinki, he would not give an inch to the press corps, which had indulged in constant conspiracy speculation.
This was the story behind the scenes of the Trump-Putin news. And the way those things worked led to even more accusations of collusion: Putin must have something about Trump. There is no other explanation for his performance at the press conference. And some of the hottest theorists believed the answer could be found in… tax returns.
“The president has refused to release his tax returns, but these strange actions he’s taken that seem to indicate that President Putin has something against President Trump, something personal and it may be financial,” said Sen. Charles Schumer. then Senate Minority Leader. “We need to see the tax returns.”
The day after the press conference, a top anti-Trump theorist, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, interviewed another anti-Trump theorist, an author named Tim O’Brien. O’Brien’s claim to fame is that he wrote a book about Trump 18 years ago. Trump sued him, and as part of the lawsuit, O’Brien was allowed to see some of Trump’s tax returns. However, he was not allowed to disclose any details. So for the past several years, O’Brien has written articles like “I’ve Seen Trump’s Tax Returns and You Should Too,” implying but not specifically saying that the returns contained evidence of wrongdoing.
It was no surprise that O’Brien jumped on the Helsinki story with a column titled “New reason for Trump to release his tax returns: Helsinki.” “Putin may have information about Trump’s finances that the president would rather keep hidden,” O’Brien wrote. “Imagine if Trump acquiesced to Putin because financial favors were exchanged for policy reversals, such as the lifting of economic sanctions on Russia or Russia’s military annexation to support parts of Ukraine. In this context, Trump’s finances — and his tax returns — touch on national security and the public interest.
That night, O’Donnell teased O’Brien’s interview by saying that “a reporter who has seen Donald Trump’s tax returns” would explain that “how much real control Vladimir Putin has over Donald Trump can be illustrated in Trump’s tax returns.” As the interview began, O’Brien said: “There’s a problem, why him [Trump] He keeps making excuses for Vladimir Putin and we know that in his business history he has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of apartments to Russian oligarchs and high-end Russian homebuyers. The theoretical work continued from there.
It was then. Fast forward to today. Trump’s tax returns are now public. And will they reveal a secret relationship with Putin? The short answer is no.
First, it’s important to remember that two years after that MSNBC show, in September 2020, the New York Times obtained a massive trove of Trump tax records and reported that it “did not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.” So now the House Ways and Means Committee has released a huge pile of tax returns officially obtained from the IRS, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, and you can read media reports after reports and never see the word “Russia” or the name “Putin.”
The results show how Trump reported huge losses over many years, how one year he was able to pay $1 million in federal income taxes and the next year $0. They show that he had many foreign bank accounts, including one in China – but not in Russia. They show that Trump aggressively used loopholes in the tax code created by Congress to benefit real estate developers. In short, they show that Trump did what he said he would do, which was to use every possible advantage of the tax laws to minimize his tax liability. Was it all strictly by the book? Democrats want the IRS to investigate the returns more closely, and perhaps issue a ruling later.
But what about the big reveal? What about Trump and Putin’s secrets hidden inside tax returns? What about the national security implications of Trump’s relationship with Russia, including in returns? What about all the feverish speculation about Trump and Russia that would be confirmed by that big stack of IRS documents?
Two words: Don’t care.