Bombshell Report Shows Donald Trump Paid No Income Tax For 10 Of 15 Years Before 2016 Election
Donald Trump paid no income taxes for 10 of the 15 years leading up to the 2016 presidential election, a bombshell new report claims.
A report published on Sunday by the The New York Times dug into the real estate mogul-turned-president’s information for the last 20 years, revealing that he paid just $750 in 2016 and again in 2017.
The newspaper reported that it had examined decades of individual and corporate records for Trump and his businesses both in the U.S. and abroad, dating back to his time as a real estate investor through his move to the White House.
A team of reporters studied the documents, though The New York Times reported that it was not making the actual records public so that it would not jeopardize sources “who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public.”
The report noted that privately, Trump is facing a very different financial situation that what he portrays to the public. The investigation found that his finances are under stress and that Trump is “beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt” coming due, debts that he has personally guaranteed.
“Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million,” the newspaper noted.
The New York Times report said that records showed that while Trump takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, he racks up chronic losses that he has aggressively used to avoid paying taxes. The documents showed that he has increasingly relied on revenue from businesses that present a conflict of interest with his job as president.
The issue of Trump’s returns was a major point of contention during the 2016 presidential campaign, as the Republican candidate broke recent precedent by refusing to release them. When Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton noted during a debate that evidence showed that he had years where he did not pay any federal income tax, the Republican had a now-famous retort.
“That makes me smart,” he replied, via CNBC.
The Trump Organization contested this weekend’s reporting, releasing a statement saying that “most, if not all” of the facts presented appeared to be inaccurate.
“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten told the newspaper.
