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- Trump accused Democrats of weaponizing his tax returns against him.
- He said in a statement that the release of his taxes would “lead to horrible things for so many people.”
- But he simultaneously said the documents, released Friday, show he’s a savvy businessman.
Former President Donald Trump released a rambling statement Friday slamming House Democrats for having “weaponized” his tax returns against him — while simultaneously claiming the documents revealing multi-million-dollar losses show that he’s a savvy businessman.
“The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people,” he said in a statement. “The great USA divide will now grow far worse. The Radical Left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!”
The former president went on to say that the tax returns show “once again show how proudly successful” he is and how he used “depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”
Trump put out the statement after House Democrats released six years of his tax returns, the end result of a years-long tug-of-war between the former president and lawmakers over his closely held financial records.
The House Ways & Means Committee released two reports earlier this month summarizing its key findings after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the panel to get access to Trump’s taxes.
The committee found that the Internal Revenue Service did not audit Trump in the first two years of his presidency and did not begin doing so until 2019, when committee chairman Richard Neal requested Trump’s tax documents as part of an investigation into the presidential auditing process.
The documents released Friday — which span thousands of pages — showed that Trump and then First Lady Melania Trump reported millions in losses from 2015 to 2020. The former president was able to pay fewer taxes by reporting negative income, and a previous New York Times investigation found that Trump paid just $750 in taxes in 2017.
Earlier this month, a Manhattan jury convicted two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization — the crown jewel of Trump’s real-estate business empire — of multiple felonies including tax fraud and falsifying business records.
The jury found that the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation, both doing business as Trump Organization, were complicit in a decade-long tax scheme run by former CFO Allen Weisselberg and top payroll executive Jeffrey McConney.
Trump and his family members were not criminally charged in the case, but prosecutors mentioned the former president multiple times while describing the perks that some top executives received, including tuition expenses, car payments, and apartments.
They also presented evidence that in the years before Trump took office in 2017, he insisted on personally approving and signing any checks that were more than $2,500. The Trump Organization now has felony status and could be ordered to pay up to $1.6 million in fees when it’s sentenced next month.
That’s in addition to the $250 million civil lawsuit that New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office filed against Trump, his three eldest children, and the Trump Organization in September.
James accused Trump of having “falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to further enrich himself and cheat the system,” adding that he “repeatedly and persistently manipulated the value of assets to induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization.”
She also said the Trump Organization’s fraudulent activity allowed it to receive more favorable loan terms, pay lower taxes, and induce insurance companies to give lower premiums.
Trump’s statement Friday quoted Forbes’ assessment of his net worth and went on to say that many of its “other numbers are wrong too, but by even bigger proportions. But that’s O.K., being wrong doesn’t matter to the Fake News!”
Laura Italiano contributed reporting.
