Trump Lashes Out at New York Times Report Alleging Years of Tax Avoidance

TEHRAN (defapress) – The New York Times obtained two decades of Donald Trump's tax information, reporting Sunday that the US president paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and again during his first year in office.

News ID: 82128

Date: 28 September 2020 - 10:51

The Times, which said it plans to publish additional stories based on the documents, reported that Trump has not paid any income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years, mostly because he reported significant losses. It reported that Trump is facing a decadelong Internal Revenue Service audit over a $72.9 million tax refund he received that could end up costing him more than $100 million.

The Times also reported that Trump has more than $300 million in loans coming due within the next few years that he is personally responsible for repaying.

The tax documents cover more than two decades, including some of his time as president, but they do not include his returns from 2018 and 2019, NBC News reported, adding that it has not seen or verified any of the documents reported by The Times.

Trump said Sunday that the story was "totally fake news" and "made up," although he acknowledged that he "didn't know anything about the story" ahead of its publication, which came moments before his news conference began.

Asked about the report that he paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and again in 2017, Trump said he has "paid a lot of money in state" taxes, although he was not specific about how much.

In response to the report, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, tweeted asking people to raise their hands "if you paid more in federal income tax than President Trump."

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement that Trump "has gamed the tax code to his advantage and used legal fights to delay or avoid paying what he owes."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement, "It is a sign of President Trump's disdain for America's working families that he has spent years abusing the tax code while passing a GOP Tax Scam for the rich that gives 83 percent of the benefits to the wealthiest 1 percent."

Trump again pledged to make his taxes public after the completion of an IRS audit, which he has said for years is why he is not making the documents public.

The Times reported that, boosted by a substantial increase in income tied to his celebrity in the 11 years after "The Apprentice" premiered, the president went on a spending spree unseen since the days before the demise of his finances of the early 1990s. But The Times said the documents revealed that the new ventures and acquisitions contributed to a drag on his bottom line rather than increased it.

In a statement to NBC News, a Trump Organization lawyer, Alan Garten, claimed that the story was "riddled with gross inaccuracies."

"Over the past decade the President has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government," Garten said.

While The Times reported that Trump did not pay income taxes for several years, he did pay other forms of federal taxes, including Medicare, Social Security and the alternative minimum tax.

The Times has previously reported about Trump's tax information, having obtained such documents — although far fewer — earlier in Trump's presidency.

Trump has waged a coast-to-coast legal battle throughout his presidency in hope of keeping the tax information hidden from the public. Trump is the only president in the past 40 years to have withheld his taxes from the public. No law requires presidents to make their taxes public.

Although he said he would release the information ahead of the 2016 election, he has since repeatedly cited IRS audits as a rationale for continuing to withhold his records.

This summer, Trump assailed a pair of Supreme Court rulings pertaining to his personal financial records, calling them "not fair," although they were not clear-cut losses for the president.

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