A vote was held by the House Ways and Means Committee that ended up showing results along party lines on the subject of releasing multiple years worth of tax returns for former President Donald Trump this past Tuesday.
The committee, which is majority controlled by Democrats, managed to outvote a united Republican dissent. This plan went off just a single day after GOP Reps. Adam Kinsinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming stood with a group of seven Democrats sitting on the House January 6 Committee to issue a recommendation of criminal charges against the previous president.
“This is one of the most important votes I will ever cast as a member of Congress, and I stand by it 100 percent,” explained Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, as reported by The New York Times.
As the lead Republican on the committee, Texas Rep, Kevin Brady called out the choice from the committee: “What was clear today is that public disclosure of President Trump’s private tax returns has nothing to do with the stated purpose of reviewing the I.R.S. presidential audit process.”
These documents, once made public, are thought to include the tax filings for the former president from the years 2015-2020, as reported by CNN. This release will also include a number of audits and tax information for a group of eight of Trump’s businesses. Trump’s tax returns will be joined by a supplemental summary from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
It is still entirely unclear what kind of timeline this will play out over. The returns must be redacted to hide sensitive personal information, such as social security numbers, prior to being released to the public eye. The process of combing through and censoring the returns is slated to happen over the course of several days.
The cast majority of Trump’s financial history as seen in his tax returns has already been reported on in a few stories from The New York Times: a report published in 2018 and another put out just two years later.
While the release of a private tax return from an American citizen by Congress is not without precedent, it is still a fairly uncommon option. Democrat’s plans to get a tax return out of Trump, which the former president has battled strongly against over the course of his career to keep private, and into the public eye is further complicated by the announcement from November 15th in which Trump stated that he will once again be making a bid for the presidency in 2024.
