The House Ways and Means Committee may soon be releasing information from several years of tax returns for former President Donald Trump ending in 2020, a new report from POLITICO revealed late this week. The publication’s outline of new developments calls the release “likely” and indicates Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the chair of the Democratic-controlled panel, supports it.
“Nearly four years ago, the Ways and Means Committee set out to fulfill our legislative and oversight responsibilities, and evaluate the Internal Revenue Service’s mandatory audit program,” Neal said this week. “As affirmed by the Supreme Court, the law was on our side, and on Tuesday, I will update the members of the committee.” The Tuesday he referenced is this upcoming Tuesday, with Democrats’ control of the chamber as a whole soon winding down.
The federal rules under which Neal eventually obtained Trump’s tax records and records for eight businesses associated with him don’t automatically make tax materials that the panel obtains public, but members of the panel can vote on making either excerpts from the documents — or apparently their entirety — public. There has also been reporting about some of Trump’s personal tax returns, and separately, prosecutors in Manhattan previously also got some of the records, but the panel’s potential move could significantly add to the public record.
“Democrats intend to release specifics from the returns, though what exactly will be unveiled is unclear,” POLITICO said on Saturday, suggesting that at least some support is also present among Democrats also on Neal’s committee. The same rules under which Neal obtained Trump’s returns following initial obstruction by Donald’s then-presidential administration and later challenges in court also allow the committee to privately obtain other individual Americans’ tax records from officials.
Trump infamously refused to release his tax returns throughout his 2016 — and then 2020 — campaign and time in the White House, which contrasted with the approach taken by numerous other presidential candidates and White House officeholders throughout recent decades of American history. The materials could allow for concerned observers to examine financially derived conflicts of interest potentially ensnaring the former president, especially as he now runs for the White House yet again.
Recent reporting from Forbes that outlined over half a dozen loans to which Trump was a party that he at least initially didn’t include on financial disclosure forms filed as president highlights how the country could once again be hurtling towards a confrontation with Trump’s widely decried financial corruption. Some of the previously unreported debt included nearly $20 million owed to a South Korean company that was only paid off in the first year of Trump’s presidency once he was in the White House. Other potentially serious problems that have emerged in the former president’s finances include the sometimes large amounts of money spent by foreign delegations at Trump’s D.C. hotel, which is now defunct. These foreign interests sometimes had matters before the U.S. government, like the example of the entourage associated with a trip by the then-Prime Minister of Malaysia spending at least $259,724 there — while that then-official was under investigation by authorities in the U.S. for involvement in money laundering.
