Six years of Trump’s tax returns RELEASED

House Democrats on Friday released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns. 

The House Ways and Means Committee dropped the returns Friday morning, with just four days left of the Democratic majority. 

They showed that Trump paid $1.7 million in federal income tax during five of the six years –  but no federal income tax at all in the year 2020. 

For years Trump has battled to keep the returns secret – breaking precedent by not making them public during his 2016 and 2020 runs for the presidency.  

Boxes of documents depart the hearing room where the House Ways and Means Committee met on December 20 and voted in favor of releasing former President Donald Trump’s taxes 

The returns account for the years 2015 to 2020, two years in which he was running for president and then the four years he was in the White House. 

They go on for nearly 6,000 pages – more than 2,700 of personal returns from the ex-president and his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, and more than 3,000 pages from Trump’s businesses. 

In both 2015 and 2016, Trump reported an adjusted gross income of around -$32 million and in 2016 it was around -$13 million, but he was back in the black in 2018 with an adjusted gross income of $24 million. In 2019 it was $4.4 million. 

And in 2020, his last year in the White House, he was in the red again reporting a -$4.8 million adjusted gross income. 

He paid some taxes in five of the six years. 

In 2015 he paid $641,931. In both 2016 and 2017 he paid just $750. In 2018, the year he had the highest adjusted gross income, he also paid the most in federal taxes: $999,466. And in 2019 he paid $133,445. 

Trump paid zero dollars in federal income tax in 2020, the returns showed.  

Presidents are supposed to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service annually, but that didn’t happen in Trump’s case. 

Democrats used that as justification to release the returns publicly, while Republicans argued the Democrats were doing so for political reasons and were setting a dangerous precedent. 

‘Our findings turned out to be simple – IRS did not begin their mandatory audit of the former president until I made my initial request,’ said House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, in a statement Friday.

The committee’s top Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, countered that statement insisting that a transcript of ‘Democrats’ secret executive session’ proved that the IRS was conducting audits of Trump’s taxes prior to the Democrats’ request.

‘Despite these facts, Democrats have charged forward with an unprecedented decision to unleash a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president, overturning decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since Watergate,’ Brady said in a statement Friday. 

Trump has already announced a 2024 White House bid.