NOTE: Rep. Erik Paulsen sits on the House Ways and Means Committee and is one of the representatives who voted to keep Trump’s taxes private — more than once.
21 House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee blocked disclosure of Donald Trump’s tax returns last month.
The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report on Tuesday accusing President Donald Trump of participating in “dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud.” Despite his many 2016 campaign promises to eventually release his tax returns, he refuses to do so, and the public is still in the dark about his personal finances. Now, thanks to a vote last month by the 21 Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee, those tax returns are unlikely to come to light in the foreseeable future. Those Republicans voted to keep the president’s tax returns hidden.
Relying on a “vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records,” the Times determined that Trump “helped his parents dodge taxes,” established with his siblings a “sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents,” assisted their father in taking “improper tax deductions worth millions more,” and formulated a “strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.”
A Trump lawyer claimed these “allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” but the president didn’t deny them. In a tweet, he repeated his standard and false claim that the paper is “failing” and described their story as “a very old, boring and often told hit piece.”
View the complete October 3 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.