Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday after years of legal fighting by the former president to keep his financial affairs secret.
The returns, which consist of thousands of pages of filings for Trump, Melania Trump, and various Trump companies, can be downloaded here.
The disclosure comes after the panel voted 24-16 to make the records public in the wake of two reports on Trump’s tax returns, with the committee alleging that the IRS did not properly audit Trump’s taxes during his time in office.
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“Our findings turned out to be simple—IRS did not begin their mandatory audit of the former president until I made my initial request,” Rep. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said in a written statement on Friday, The New York Times reports.
Revelations from the newly published tax records covering 2015 through 2020 have already emerged, including from the panel’s reports last week. Among the most shocking findings was the bombshell that Trump paid no income taxes at all in 2020 during his last year in the White House as his income plummeted. The report said he’d paid $1.1 million in federal income taxes in the first three years of his presidential term.
But the full data release of six years of Trump’s tax returns could yield more insights into Trump’s financial arrangements, including if he personally benefited from tax policies he passed as president.
The New York Times reported that the opposite may have been true: while he enacted a tax bill that scaled back the alternative minimum tax on high income earners, the law also drastically reduced the deductions he could claim. For example, his 2019 returns show he reported paying $8.4 million in state and local taxes, and was only able to deduct $10,000 of that on his federal return.
The full returns also show that Trump seemingly lost interest in his 2015 campaign promise that he wouldn’t pocket “even one dollar” of the $400,000 salary if he became president.
Returns for his first three years as president show that Trump donated his salary, but he reported $0 in charitable giving in 2020, the Times reported.
While previous presidents have voluntarily made their tax returns public, Trump refused to follow their example as both a candidate and as president. He repeatedly argued he couldn’t do so because he was under audit—an excuse refuted by the committee. The Democrat-run committee only obtained the 2015-2020 returns in recent weeks after a lengthy legal fight against Trump and his attorneys who have spent years attempting to keep the records under wraps.
In a statement following the disclosure Friday, Trump told CBS the returns show “how proudly successful” he’s been.
“The Democrats 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,” he said. “The great USA divide will now grow far worse. The radical, left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street! The ‘Trump’ tax 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.”
The release of Trump’s taxes comes after the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol referred Trump to the Justice Department for possible criminal charges, including incitement of insurrection and conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
It also comes just days before Republicans take control of the House on Tuesday after clinching a small majority in last month’s midterms. Some Republicans had opposed the publication of Trump’s returns on the grounds that it could set an unwelcome precedent. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), the Ways and Means Committee’s ranking member, said the move “unleashes a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president, and overturns decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since the Watergate reforms.”
But Chairman Neal insisted the release was not “punitive” or “malicious,” with committee member Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) adding: “It’s about making sure there are checks and balances for the presidency.”
