President Donald Trump is the first President in modern political history who ascended to the White House without making public his tax returns.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump said that he wasn't inclined to reveal his tax returns, because he was allegedly under audit. He assured Americans, however, that he would disclose the returns if he won. We're now over two years into his presidency, and we've yet to see what has been expected of every President since Richard Nixon.
Trump recently took refuge in the audit excuse again continuing this pattern of secrecy.
Bloomberg Opinion executive editor Tim O'Brien says he knows why.
O'Brien is the author of the biography TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald and—in an interview with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace—claimed to have seen the President's tax returns.
"He sued me for the biography I wrote on him," O'Brien said. "Because he sued me for about three pages of the book that focus on how much money he had, when we got to the discovery process we got his bank records and his taxes and his business records.”
He continued:
“I think it’s pretty clear what he’s afraid of coming out in those things. Part of it’s his ego, he doesn’t want people to know that his business is not as robust as he’s always claimed it to be.”
O'Brien also claimed that the foreign entanglements the tax returns would reveal would also be damning.
Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee recently requested six years' worth of Trump's tax returns from the IRS, but O'Brien says that won't be enough.
“I think they need to go back about 15 years,” he said. “A lot of cash came into his business in the mid-[2000's] from sources that are very murky. And I think they would answer a lot of questions about his relationship with Russia for example.”
Many Americans suspect that something fishy is afoot.
Demands for their release grow by the day.
The White House is making an effort to block their release, but—now that Ways and Means is demanding them—it's up to the IRS.
