(NewsGlobal.com)- The House Ways and Means Committee released the income tax returns of Donald Trump Tuesday night, and the former president says the act is “illegal.”
Before the documents were released to the public, Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to lash out at the Democrat-led House committee, accusing them of “illegally leaking confidential info to anyone that will listen.”
The committee has battled for years to gain access to Trump’s tax returns for six years. Trump has been fighting to prevent that from happening, though he lost the final battle in that war in November.
The IRS handed the former president’s tax returns over to the committee a week ago, and committee members took some time before deciding what to do with them. Eventually, they decided that they wanted to release them to the public.
It was apparent over the weekend that Trump was preparing for the fact that the committee was going to release the documents, even though at that point they hadn’t made an official decision. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday:
“Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff is all over T.V. talking about Criminal Referrals, just like he was on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, which turned out to be the con of the century. How much longer are Republicans, and American Patriots in general, going to allow this to happen.
“These are the Criminals who spied on my campaign, cheated on the Election, lied to FISA Court & Congress. They are SICK!”
Almost seeking to answer what he figured would be questions people would raise about his tax returns, Trump said that “the so-called experts [who] think they know so much about my very successful private company actually know almost nothing.”
He claimed his company has “lots of cash, some of the greatest assets anywhere in the world, and with very little debt.” Yet, he said the entire picture of the company won’t be revealed in the tax returns. He wrote:
“You will be seeing these numbers soon, but not all from my tax returns, which show relatively little. EVERYONE will be impressed.”
What the returns did show, according to a Politico report, is that Trump paid almost nothing in federal income taxes from 2015 through 2020. This is despite the fact that Trump reported millions of dollars worth of earnings on his tax returns.
Politico, which reviewed the tax returns released Tuesday night, said that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. He didn’t pay any federal income taxes at all in 2020.
In addition, Democrats are claiming that the IRS — which had a long-standing policy of auditing every president’s tax returns automatically — didn’t start vetting the filings from Trump until 2019, when the House Ways and Means Committee began asking about them.
This is pertinent because Trump said one of the reasons why he wasn’t releasing his tax returns to the public on his own was that he was under continuous IRS audits at the time.
