The top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee laid into Democrats on Sunday for releasing former President Donald Trump’s tax returns after years of legal battles and just days before Republicans take control of the House.
The documents revealed that the former president’s real estate conglomerate reported years of multimillion-dollar losses, prompting jabs from Democrats eager to chip away at Mr. Trump’s self-proclaimed success as Republicans warned of setting a “dangerous precedent” of their release.
“Every American ought to be frightened by this precedent because the enemies list is back, and you might find yourself on it,” Rep. Kevin Brady, Texas Republican and ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“This isn’t about whether President Trump should have released [his tax returns]. That’s not the law; it’s the tradition,” Mr. Brady said. “This is a dangerous new precedent. It overturns 50 years of protections for American taxpayers.”
From 2015 to 2020, Mr. Trump paid anywhere from zero to $1 million in income taxes annually. The details were released after he rebuffed tradition by refusing to disclose his tax returns as a presidential candidate.
Mr. Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015, the year he began his campaign for president. He paid just $750 in 2016 and 2017, nearly $1 million in 2018, $133,445 in 2019 and zero in 2020.
“For someone who brags about his riches, his taxes show he is a loser,” Rep. Jackie Speier, California Democrat, said in a post on Twitter. “Now we understand why he didn’t want us to see his tax returns.”
The House Ways and Means Committee provided Mr. Trump’s naysayers with additional ammunition, capping the former president’s yearslong fight to keep the 6,000 pages of records from the public’s eyes.
The filings for 2020 show that more than 150 of Mr. Trump’s business entities listed negative qualified business income. Coupled with almost $9 million in losses carried forward from previous years, Mr. Trump’s qualified losses amounted to more than $58 million for the final year of his term in office.
Still, the revelations provided little — besides gloating such as Ms. Speier’s — for Democrats to talk about over the weekend despite Mr. Trump’s announcement of another run at the White House.
The former president is old news, said Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican.
“I think you have to start him out as the front-runner simply because he’s polling that well. He’s the former president. But as I have said all through 2022, he does not define the Republican Party,” Mr. Hutchinson said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
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“We have to have other voices. That’s the key thing for the future. And whenever you look at what’s happened with Donald Trump, since he announced that he’s going to run again for president, is that you have continued chaos” surrounding him, the outgoing governor said.
Mr. Trump has blasted Democrats for releasing his taxes. He has said in posts on his social media site Truth Social and in a statement that the “radical left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!”
“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,” he said.
Congress has the authority to obtain any individual Americans’ taxes, but Republicans say it was pure abuse of power and that the “investigative function” claims used in court were mere pretexts.
Still, they took heart from saying the returns have no evidence of wrongdoing in his businesses, contrary to accusations from Democrats.
“The Democrats illegally releasing President Trump’s personal tax records is a new low in the biggest political persecution of any President in history,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican.
Now “everyone gets to see how successful Pres Trump is & that he always followed the IRS rules,” she said.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal, who led the charge in obtaining Mr. Trump’s tax returns, lauded their release.
“Ways and Means is entrusted with great responsibilities,” the Massachusetts Democrat said last week. “The weight of our job is heavy. Congress serves as a check on the executive branch, and our committee is entrusted with oversight of our revenue system.”
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.
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