The Patriot Post® · Dem Scavengers Pick Through Trump Tax Returns

Now we know why Democrats wanted another $80 billion and 87,000 more employees for the IRS. Someone has to comb through Donald Trump’s tax returns looking for dirt to run in Democrat campaign ads.

After a years-long legal battle and a day after the sham J6 Committee voted to recommend criminal referrals to the Justice Department, Democrats running the House Ways and Means Committee voted 24-16 along party lines Tuesday to release six years of Trump’s tax returns. They wouldn’t have done so if they didn’t think they’d find something — anything — to smear or even incriminate the former president.

“I voted to reinforce this critical principle: No person is above the law, not even a president of the United States,” opined Democrat Representative Brendan Boyle.

Sure thing. Now do Joe Biden, who schemed with his son to earn tens of millions of dollars in an influence-peddling scheme with foreign adversaries like China. We’re guessing there might be something fishy about those Biden family tax returns.

Of course, Democrats don’t care one wit about the law in that case.

Trump’s actual returns won’t be released for at least a few days while things like Social Security numbers and bank information are redacted. For now, the trickle of information began with finger-wagging and tongue-clicking over how, in the six years between 2015 and 2020, Donald and Melania Trump reported negative adjusted gross income in four of them. Total claimed losses reached $53.2 million over that stretch, though they paid $4.4 million in federal taxes.

If you think we’re kidding or exaggerating about the IRS comment above, here’s what The Wall Street Journal reported Democrats are saying: “The Internal Revenue Service hasn’t completed the Trumps’ audits for any of those years, and Democrats contended that the agency was too slow and timid in how it handled the complex, sensitive tax returns of Mr. Trump, particularly during his presidency.” Moreover, “Democrats said the returns showed that the IRS program of automatic audits of presidents wasn’t working effectively.”

Those things may be true, but it’s also awfully convenient for the party arguing for more money and more employees for the IRS while now in year eight of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The real problem here is that Democrats are once again weaponizing the IRS and the tax code to bludgeon a political opponent. Remember that June 2021 ProPublica blockbuster report about how many billionaires weren’t “paying their fair share”? That report publicized the illegally leaked returns of numerous individuals, primarily to further the Democrat narrative about taxes. They’ll do the same with Trump now.

Trump could have headed this off himself by releasing his own tax returns years ago, following precedent set by every other presidential candidate in recent decades. He chose not to, which is certainly his prerogative, though he always used the “under audit” excuse to avoid taking responsibility for the decision. The problem is that maybe he simply wanted to hide things he’d rather the public didn’t know.

In February 2016, Mark Alexander wrote about Trump’s “most taxing questions,” criticizing Trump for being so opaque and challenging him to release more information. That year, one such question could have been that Trump was a Democrat prior to 2009 and didn’t want his Republican voter base to see what he’d supported prior to his conversion. Furthermore, as we noted above, maybe he didn’t report much income over numerous years. Maybe he’s not as wealthy as he’d like for people to believe. To that point, maybe he’ll run into real legal trouble if he misrepresented income, assets, or liabilities while applying for loans or something similar.

That said, probably most Americans would run into some sort of trouble with their tax returns under an audit because the tax code is impossibly complex. Take your returns to three different accountants and you might get three different results. That’s exponentially more likely for a man with returns as complicated as Trump’s. In other words, it’s not necessarily nefarious wrongdoing on his part, though it’s definitely an indictment of the tax code and of Democrats who want to exploit it for political gain.

After all, one thing is certain: Democrats and their deep state allies will never stop trying to get Trump.