After a Tuesday vote, Democrats on the House and Ways Committee have voted to release six years of President Trump's tax returns, in what Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), the top Republican on the Committee, called a 'new political weapon.'
"This meeting actually sets a terrible precedent that unleashes a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president," Brady told reporters on Tuesday. "I won't speculate on what the next Congress and this committee will focus on related to tax returns, but I do know that a major focus will be on the IRS."
The committee voted along party lines, 24-16, to make public the returns - which will span 2015 to 2020. The actual release could come within hours.
Progressives, meanwhile, cheered the decision.
"Chairman [Richard Neal (D-MA)] and the Ways and Means Democrats are to be congratulated for their dogged pursuit of this important information. Now they must share the fruit of their labors with the American people, the final arbiters of what is acceptable behavior by our elected leaders," said Frank Clemente, director of the Americans for Tax Fairness nonprofit.
That said, some legal minds are saying that Democrats would be abusing the oversight process if they rush to make the tax returns public without substantially assessing the presidential audit program - the ostensible reason for obtaining Trump's returns, The Hill reports.
"Any review of the presidential audit program that starts now and ends when the GOP takes control of the House in January would be slapdash and superficial," said NYU Law professor Daniel Hemel in an article posted to Lawfare earlier this month.
"Neal and the House Ways and Means Committee would undermine their own credibility-and could be seen as hoodwinking the courts and the public-if they proceeded to release the returns outside the context of a comprehensive review of the presidential audit program," he added.
Tax experts have expressed doubts about whether the documents obtained by the committee are enough to back up years of investigative reporting that also gained access to Trump's financial records and painted a dismal picture of Trump as a businessman.
"It could be a case of too little too late," Steve Rosenthal, an analyst with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said in an interview. "I expect very little, without a fuller probe." -The Hill
In 2017, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow released two pages of Trump's 2005 tax returns, which revealed that he paid $38 million that year, and the rate he paid was higher than Mitt Romney and several other top earners.
via zerohedge