• A Democratic-controlled House committee release Trump’s tax returns.
• Move comes days before Republicans take the chamber.
• The Supreme Court just ended four-year legal dispute last month.

A Democratic-controlled United States House of Representatives committee released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to the public on Friday in an extraordinary move just days before Republicans are due to take control of the chamber.

The release of Trump’s redacted tax returns for the years 2015 through 2020 ends a nearly four-year legal spat that the US Supreme Court just resolved last month between the former Republican president and Democratic lawmakers.

The 76-year-old Trump, who was twice impeached by the Democratic-controlled House before being cleared both times by the Senate, is now dealing with a number of legal issues as he runs for reelection in 2024.

On January 6, 2021, Trump’s followers attacked the US Capitol, killing four people. Earlier this month, the House committee looking into the incident urged federal prosecutors to charge Trump with four crimes, including obstruction and insurrection, for his role in the deadly riot.

“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,” Trump said of the release in a statement Friday. “The radical, left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!”

He said the returns “once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises”.

Richard Neal, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had asked for the returns in 2019. He claimed that Congress need them to decide whether or not legislation addressing presidential tax returns was necessary.

Republicans expressed concern that the move may transform personal tax returns into a political weapon and warned that party members who take over the panel next month may feel forced to use the same strategy against prominent Democrats.

Trump, who took office in 2017, was the first nominee in decades to withhold his tax returns. While he was the president of the United States, he had fought in court to keep them a secret.

However, the Supreme Court decided last month that he had to give them to the Ways and Means Committee, which draughts tax laws.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) violated its own standards by failing to audit Trump for three out of the four years that he was president, the committee concluded in a report released last week after studying the papers.

On April 3, 2019, more than two years after Trump took office, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the committee asked the IRS for information pertaining to the tax returns, and the IRS only then started to examine Trump’s 2016 tax returns.

According to Andrew Bates, a White House spokeswoman, President Joe Biden’s tax returns for the years 2020 and 2021 were audited. According to a representative for the previous president, Barack Obama, each of his eight years in office included an audit.

Trump’s carryover losses, deductions for charitable contributions and environmental causes, and loans to his children that may be considered taxable gifts are just a few of the issues that the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation of Congress noted in a report about the president’s tax returns.

Trump did not pay income tax in 2020, his final full year in office, despite making millions from his vast commercial empire, according to information previously made public by the panel.

Trump’s income and tax obligations changed significantly between 2015 and 2020, during his first run for president and the succeeding period in office, according to the data.

They demonstrate that during several of those years, Trump and his wife Melania Trump claimed significant losses and deductions while paying little to no income tax.

The returns will probably provide the clearest picture yet of Trump’s financial situation throughout his term in office.

“During his first few years in the presidency, his income appeared to stabilize. But then in 2020, he reported a loss of some $4 million, which resulted in him paying zero tax in 2020,” said Media.

“Now another thing about this is that Donald Trump himself claimed that he would not release his tax records because he was under audit. These records indicate that that was a blatant lie.”

Before being elected president, Trump built towers and hosted a reality TV program. He did, however, provide some limited information about his assets and income on required disclosure forms.

He has marketed his riches in the yearly financial accounts he submits to banks in order to obtain loans and to financial publications in order to maintain his position among the world’s billionaires.

Since then, the statements have been denied by Trump’s longtime accounting company, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has launched a lawsuit, saying that Trump and his Trump Organization exaggerated asset values on the statements as part of a long-running scam.

Any impropriety has been rejected by Trump and his business.

The Trump Organization was found guilty earlier this month on separate tax fraud charges for aiding some executives in evading taxes on benefits including residences and expensive automobiles that were provided by the firm.

Given that Republicans would gain control of the House on Tuesday after securing a narrow majority in the midterm elections in November, Democrats were under pressure to come up with a plan to handle the returns as soon as they were made available.

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