Remember all those times Donald Trump claimed he’d release his tax returns when he was done being audited? Prepare yourself for a shock: He lied. Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway confirmed that on ABC’s This Week:
[Stephanopoulos:] You mentioned a couple hundred thousand people who sent in petitions on health care, talking about health care, you also have more than 200,000 who petitioned the White House calling on President Trump to release his full tax returns with all information needed to verify emolument's clause compliance.
Whenever 100,000 petition, that triggers a White House response. So, what is the White House response?
CONWAY: 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.
“People didn’t care. They voted for him”—except that the majority of people didn’t vote for him. No matter how many times a member of the Trump regime suggests otherwise, it will continue to be true that he lost the popular vote.
Additionally:
60 percent of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey released on Jan. 10 said that Trump has a responsibility to release his tax returns.
But Trump is really, really afraid of what we’d learn if he did that, so he seems to be abandoning all of the delaying and excuses he offered during the campaign in favor of a flat no that adds one more lie to his sizable pile of lies. It reopens the question of what he’s so afraid of, though, and where early in the campaign, a leading theory was that we’d find out how rich he wasn’t, now his possible debts to Russians and other likely violations of the emoluments clause are at the top of the list.