Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a Democrat-led House committee on Friday after the former president and real-estate mogul battled to keep them secret.
Thousands of pages of documents being reviewed by DailyMail.com confirm Trump paid little federal income tax while he was in the White House and nothing in 2020.
He and wife Melania reported that they had a negative income of $53.2million from 2015 to 2020.
And Trump paid $1.7 million in taxes over the six-year period, including just $750 in both 2016 and 2017.
The returns show that Trump held financial accounts in China, the United Kingdom, Ireland and St. Martin.
House Democrats on Friday released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
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 House Ways and Means Committee dropped the returns Friday morning, with just four days left of the Democratic majority.
The returns account for the years 2015 to 2020 – two years in which Trump 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.
The ex-president both shamed the Democrats for releasing his returns Friday and boasted about what they said about him as a longtime real estate developer and television personality.
‘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 in a statement Friday. ‘The radical, left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!’
He added, ‘The “Trump” tax 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.’
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.
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.
In 2020, former President Donald Trump paid no federal taxes. That year he reported a -$4.8 million adjusted gross income
In 2015, the year former President Donald Trump launched what would become a successful presidential bid, he reported nearly negative $32 million in income
Presidents are supposed to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service annually, but that didn’t happen in Trump’s case, according to reports published by the House Ways and Means Committee earlier this month.
The reports said that the IRS didn’t audit Trump during the first two years of his presidency and did not start looking through the filings until 2019 – after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives.
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.
A century-old law allows the leaders of Congressional tax committees to see the tax returns of any American.
Both Neal and Brady had access to the returns, though Democrats feared once Republicans took control of the House on January 3, their access would be cut off.
Trump has already announced a 2024 White House bid.
A nonpartisan committee, the Joint Committee on Taxation, reviewed Trump’s taxes for the House Ways and Means Committee before public release and found several questionable practices – including money given to his adult children and a write-off of lawsuit settlement funds related to the now defunct Trump University.
