In this electoral season of ironies, it is yet more irony that the two outsiders railing loudest against the establishment – Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump – have struggled the most with a matter routine for “insider” candidates: disclosing their federal tax returns.
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“There is only one logical explanation for Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his returns: there is a bombshell in them”, he continued. The 2012 GOP nominee posited that Trump might be reluctant to release his returns because he was either not as wealthy as he claimed or hasn’t been paying “the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay”.
“There’s nothing to learn from them”, Trump said, adding that he doesn’t believe voters are interested.
While Trump will likely face Clinton in the general election, the Democratic front-runner took a much softer approach than Romney in New Jersey, which holds a June 7 primary.
This year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that because his tax filings are under audit and that his lawyers are advising him not to release them to the public.
Clinton responded to a supporter’s shout-out in the rally, asking, “what about his tax returns?”
“You’ve got to ask yourself, why doesn’t he release them?” “I guess at this point he’s in it to help Hillary”. The latest news is that Trump is saying he will not now, not ever, release his tax returns.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s attorneys included tax returns from 2000 through 2004 in a set of documents that the state’s Gaming Control Board stamped as “received” on February 9, 2006. Romney has been very critical of Trump for several months and asked Republican voters to reject the real estate mogul.
“There is nothing that prevents releasing tax returns that are being audited”, he said. Before Trump entered the race, he told Hugh Hewitt in early 2015 that if he ran, “I would release tax returns”. CNN’s Marlena Baldacci spoke with Joseph Thorndike of the Tax History Project, who linked the release of returns to the famous “Checkers” speech by Richard Nixon. She said his tax plan was “written by a billionaire for billionaires”.
In addition to giving a sense of Trump’s annual income and wealth, tax returns would also reveal Trump’s charitable contributions and the tax deductions and credits from which he benefits.
“No”, Trump replies, “I actually think that it’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful, and that you’ve made a lot of money, that you’ve employed a lot of people”.
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Neera Tanden, a former Clinton aide and the head of the Center for American Progress, said on a call Wednesday that “Trump is now trying to cover up the bald spots in his economic plan but women can see for themselves and women can see through his comb over”.
