The House Ways and Means Committee now has access to six years of Donald Trump's tax returns. What are they going to do with them? Yes. So they have to decide now that they have access, how exactly they're going to handle the returns.
That could be the main point in a meeting they're going to have with legal counsel tomorrow. The big thing, though, is it's unclear if the public will get to see these six years of Trump's tax returns.
We know that the public and all of us definitely won't get immediate access to them. It's possible they could be released sometime down the road. Of course, that could impact Trump's presidential bid that he's announced for 2024.
Trump has already, for years, repeatedly refused to release his tax returns throughout 20 16, 20 20 campaigns, even throughout his presidency. We did get a glimpse of information from The New York Times back in 2020.
They found that Trump paid no federal income taxes at all beginning in 2000. So we could see potential in the future, depending on what the House Ways and Means Committee decides to do with these returns, what else might be buried in six years of Trump's tax returns.
But it's not anything the public's going to see anytime soon. And this committee has just weeks before they wrap up to decide how they want to handle them as well. John. All right, Jessica Snyder, thank you so much.
With us now is an investigative reporter and Trump biographer David K. Johnson, author of The Big Cheat how Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. So, David, the House Ways and Means Committee, they don't have much time to investigate the former president's taxes if they want to.
Democrats only control this committee for another month or so. What are the most immediate questions that could be answered by these arguments? Well, they could tell us definitively whether Donald. On his tax returns, manipulated the value of assets he was depreciating.
When you own an asset like a building, you get to write off part of the cost of it each year, and it saves you tax dollars. And we know from the New York Times investigation four years ago that Trump manipulated values all over the in place to deal with loans and insurance documents.
So that would be one of the first things to look for and second, to look for numbers that don't match up. You claim to have X amount of money in the bank in a particular account at the end of an entity.
Donald has 500 entities, and the amount of money you have the next year doesn't match up. It should be exactly the closeout is the start of the next year, but they don't have much time to look at that if that's what they want to do.
So the tax returns and questions are primarily from the period when Donald Trump was president when he was in the White House. So how do you think that affects the investigation? Well, I'd be much more interested, John, in seeing the tax returns before he became president because there's testimony in the ongoing New York City trial on tax cheating by the Trump Organization that they cleaned up their behavior once Donald Trump arrived in the White House.
But the issue the committee was concerned about was Donald Trump's repeated claims that he was persecuted by the IRS because he's a Christian. Never mind that he has called in a book Christians, Fools and Schmucks and Idiots and has declared repeatedly his life's philosophy is revenge, which is inherently anti-Christian.
That was the issue. Where the President of the United States and our presidential candidates are being treated properly by the IRS. That's an issue I can imagine Democrats, the Republicans might want to get into, depending on how facts turn out in the future.
Not likely, but possible since they're always trying to beat up the IRS. So the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard Neal, declined to say whether they would release any of these returns publicly.
Publicly. Do you think any of these will see the light of day? Well, I hope so. First and foremost, Richie Neal is very concerned about a section of the tax code that makes tax returns confidential. They used to be public records.
100 year ago they were public, but they're not now. There are procedures by which the committee can put the tax returns into the public record. He's having a meeting with his caucus on the committee.
And I think one of the things they're certain to discuss is, is there a way for them to put this into the Congressional Record so that it's always there and people on the outside can crowdsource and audit?
Look, the former President's legal team has fought for years. So as the former President keeps these secrets. You've reported on him extensively. Why do you think he worked so hard to keep these from going public?
Because Donald is a tax cheat. I mean, I've established in the public record previously he cheated on sales taxes, he cheated on payroll taxes, actually even cheated novice roulette players at one of his casinos.
And the New York Times investigation that they said was inspired by my reporting four years ago showed very, very calculated income tax cheating by the Trump family. It also involved gift tax and estate tax cheating.
That's who Trump is. He's done this his whole life. He's cheated investors and workers and, as I said, even some gamblers. So, of course, the tax returns, if fully audited, are going to show that he cheated on his income taxes.
David K. Johnson, thank you for your insight. Thank you, John.