In a Politico interview, retiring IRS commissioner John Koskinen explained that not even he has seen Donald Trump's mysterious tax returns—and that the agency is building a new safe to keep them in.
He’s never looked up Trump’s tax returns—legally, he can’t, and neither can any other IRS employee who isn’t working on them—and says the agency not only keeps them in a locked cabinet in a locked room, but is replacing the cabinet with a safe. [...]
"It’s in a locked cabinet in a locked room that nobody’s in. You’ll need a key to the room and the cabinet to get it. We’re in the process of turning that cabinet into a safe. We keep all the returns from every president in there."
So anybody looking to pull off a National Treasure-esque heist to spirit away Donald's supposedly forever-under-audit tax returns will find themselves hard-pressed to do so.
Who figured the IRS would keep the tax histories of every elected president on paper in a big ol' cabinet? It’s safe to say most people imagined they would have those returns on computers now.
There is, of course, nothing standing in the way of Donald Trump simply releasing those returns. That is what every modern presidential candidate has done. It has been the expected ethical norm. While on the campaign trail, he himself repeatedly promised to do so. He lied, of course, because he is a sociopathic garbage fire in a suit, but he did say the words.
Given the scope of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into potential campaign collusion with the Russian intelligence efforts designed to bend the 2016 election Trump's way—an investigation that has already focused on illicit financial dealings between Trump campaign head Paul Manafort and his pro-Russia foreign benefactors—it is almost certain that Mueller's team already has Trump's own records as well. It'd be malpractice not to examine them.
That doesn't mean we'll ever hear what they contain. But some of the most-feared investigators in the nation are now combing through them, and if those records do end up showing what so many of Trump's critics suspect they show—that Trump's real estate empire has been built in large part on Russian money-laundering schemes—it's quite likely that that little detail will come out.