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All over the country, regular schlubs like us are scrambling to meet tonight's midnight deadline to file our tax returns (and if you filed weeks ago, no one in comments wants to hear about it!). Meanwhile, the occupier of the Oval Office is tweeting nonsense about his "Tax Cut Bill" that "everyone is talking" about.
Which reminds me, where are your taxes returns, Donald? Did you file? When are you going to make them public? Oh, yeah, you can't do that because you're "under a routine audit and it'll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released." That audit that's been going on since at least September 2016. Boy, they must be a complicated mess, huh?
That's just one of excuses Trump has used over the last year and a half to explain why he refuses to prove that he's 1) as wealthy as he claims to be, and 2) isn't really a wholly owned subsidiary of Russian oligarchs. Here's a partial list of stories he had while he was running for office.Trump: “I’m being audited … so I can’t.” (See next section.) (Repeatedly since February.)
- Trump: “There’s nothing to learn from them.” (Fact-checkers say this is false.) (February, February, May, May, January)
- Trump: “Mitt Romney looked like a fool when he delayed and delayed and delayed and … didn’t file until a month and a half before the election and it cost him big league.” (February, July)
- Trump: His tax rate is “none of your business.” (May) [...]
- Trump: “I don’t think anybody cares.” (Polls show this is false.) (May, September) [...]
- Trump: “You will learn more about Donald Trump” by looking at his financial disclosure forms than by looking at tax returns. (Fact-checkers say this is false.) (September) [...]
- Trump: Blames Clinton for fact he doesn’t pay taxes: “A lot of my write-off was depreciation, and that, Hillary as a senator, allowed. The people that give her all this money want it.” (As a senator, Clinton did vote to close tax loopholes — including one Trump may have used to pay no federal income taxes.) (October)
- Trump: “The only ones that care about my tax returns are the reporters.” (Roughly 74 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Republicans, say Trump should make his tax returns public, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll in January.) (January)
That's all just from 2016! And, yes, he's refusing to release them again for the third year in a row.
What really matters, though, is whether Robert Mueller has seen them. Until we find out, we'll all just assume all the secrecy is because of the Russian oligarch thing.