In January, Donald Trump had this to say when he was asked about whether he would release his tax returns: “I have very big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very attractive and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time“. Trump has said only a “really stupid person is paying a lot of taxes”. By the time he got around to releasing his tax returns in 2012, Democrats had already spent months beating him about the neck and shoulders with charges he couldn’t refute and allegations he couldn’t counter.
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“Here is what Donald Trump wants to do”.
“I don’t think they do”.
Clinton has not released this year’s taxes yet, but plans to.
“I am not going to respond to the insults and the attacks coming from Donald Trump in this campaign”, Clinton said. “I’m a little surprised they weren’t better prepared for that”.
Trump said he will release them after the audit ends, but that he wouldn’t overrule his lawyers and instruct them to release his returns if the audit hasn’t concluded by November. We spoke with a tax attorney who agreed that it wasn’t a great idea to take documents central to an investigation – which is what an audit is – and make them public.
Have a look at the most hilarious descriptions of Trump in the video above. Trump’s returns would show how active he and his businesses are globally – and would help substantiate the actual size and scope of his operation. My husband and I have released 33 years of tax returns, we’ve got 8 years on our website right now. Depending on how much income he has, Trump might not pay very much in taxes, especially because he could have used real estate depreciation provisions in the tax code and carried forward business operating losses from past years, Fortune noted.
Increasingly, the presumptive Republican nominee is under pressure to release his returns.
Every presidential nominee for each political party dating back four decades has released their tax returns to the public. And if they don’t, it will be an admission that they have something to hide. He has continued to decline calls to release his returns since then. (This was the “I am not a crook” incident.) He did.
In her speech today, Clinton eventually turned to Trump’s own tax returns.
He was required to turn over tax returns in New Jersey, as well, where state law requires five years’ worth of tax returns from casino license applicants. “For many years, I’ve been audited every year”, he said during a February 25 Republican debate in Houston. In 1980, as Jimmy Carter was trying to fend off Ted Kennedy’s challenge to his reelection nomination, a White House spokesman pivoted from questions about Carter’s taxes to ones about Kennedy’s.
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“We’ll see. I mean, we’re gonna see”.
