For months leading up to the November Elections, Donald Trump insisted that he would gladly release his tax returns, a custom that has been observed by presidential candidates from both parties for decades just as soon as the IRS completed an ongoing “Audit”
I put the word Audit in quotation marks because Trump and Co. never provided any evidence that such an audit actually existed.
Fast forward to after the election and the story quickly changed. In an interview with ABC News, Kellyanne Conway declared;
"The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns,"
"We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care,” "They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like. And you know full well that President Trump and his family are complying with all the ethical rules, everything they need to do to step away from his businesses and be a full-time president."
We are asked to take their word as proof that they are complying with ethics regulations, but their actions over the past 3 weeks has made it abundantly clear that this administration is not worthy of any level of trust. We need to verify, and congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) has given us the mechanism to demand that congress do so. I encourage everyone to read the letter that congressman Pascrell has sent to the chairman of the ways and means committee (shockingly there hasn’t been any response to date), he sums up the need for oversight far better than I can, but in summary he calls on the Chairman to
If the President does not either release his returns or consent to examination of such returns by this Committee, I urge you, as Chairman of the Committee and pursuant to Section 6103(f)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code, to submit a written request to the Secretary of the Treasury for copies of the President’s federal tax returns by February 15, 2017. These returns and all accompanying return information should then be made available for examination by all Committee Members in a closed executive session. I further request that the Committee then vote in this closed session to submit the President’s federal tax returns to the House of Representatives—thereby, if successful, making them available to the public. This Committee followed a similar procedure to release confidential taxpayer information in the past during its exhaustive investigation of the treatment of certain tax-exempt organizations.[10]
This is a concrete action we should be demanding that these congressman take, at the very least their refusal to cooperate will make them part and party to trumps coverup. We should encourage every democratic member of congress to join Rep Pascrell and force these three republican chairs to go on the record on this important issue.
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