Following a protracted legal struggle to keep the records hidden, the House Ways and Means Committee reportedly published former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday.
Last Monday, the influential committee voted along party lines to release the tax returns after the Supreme Court denied the former commander-in-attempt chief’s to prevent the IRS from providing the data to Congress.
The records, which have been redacted to remove sensitive information including Social Security numbers, span the years 2015 through 2020 and contain both individual and corporation registrations.
The newly revealed papers contain over 6,000 pages of information on how Trump handled his taxes; he frequently exploited various deductions and company losses to reduce the amount he owed the federal government.
The Joint Committee on Taxation issued a report last week that disclosed how much Donald and Melania Trump owed in taxes for each of the six years they filed joint returns. In 2018, and 2019, the pair paid a total of $1.1 million, plus $750 in 2017.
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee earlier said that the IRS violated its own policies by failing to audit Trump during his first two years in office and only began investigating Trump’s 2015 income tax return on the same day in 2019 that the panel requested it.
In a Friday statement, Trump questioned the release of the records, which did not elicit claims of wrongdoing from legislators.
In an statement, Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Kevin Brady (R-TX) stated that the efforts to expose the records were political in character, and that the revelation of the tax returns will allow future politicians to attack private persons with impunity.
Trump himself has long contended that the fixation on his tax records was politically motivated.
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