Washington: US lawmakers voted Tuesday to release Donald Trump's tax returns, ending the former president's years-long battle to keep the documents secret as his questionable financial past continues to fuel controversy.
The Republican leader violated presidential tradition by refusing to release the archives, fueling frenzied speculation about what they might contain. The Republican leader is running for the White House again after losing the 2020 election.
In one of its last acts before handing the reins over to Republicans in January, the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee voted 24-16 along party lines to release six years' worth of the billionaire's filings.
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Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett told CNN that the US Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation's analysis and raw returns will be included in a summary report that will be sent to the entire House of Representatives.
To allow time for editing information like Social Security numbers and other similar items, he said, "there could be a delay of a few days."
The vote was held following a victory for committee chairman Richard Neill in gaining access to the 2015-20 documents at the conclusion of a protracted legal battle that reached the Supreme Court.
After the vote, he declared, "It wasn't about being punitive, it wasn't about being malicious—and no information was leaked from the committee."
The returns, which were covered by privacy laws that made it a crime for anyone to leak the information, were made available only to a small, specialized group of MPs.
However, the law allows lawmakers in charge of taxation to review any US taxpayer's return.
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Trump's financial status has always aroused the interest of the American public, partly because of his ability to keep it secret and partly because of the lavish lifestyle he led before becoming president as a real estate mogul. Cause
His charitable contributions, potential conflicts of interest, and the effects of the pandemic and his presidency on his businesses could all be revealed in returns.
The Trump family business was found guilty of tax fraud earlier this month, in a case described by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as "about greed and fraud."
Trump was not charged, but the business and another Trump family entity were found guilty of running a 13-year scheme to defraud the government and avoid taxes by falsifying financial records.
In 2020, The New York Times published a financial investigation into Trump, alleging that during the years prior to his election, he paid too little federal income tax.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, claimed that the allegation demonstrated "Trump's disdain for America's working families". Democrats seized on the charge.
The allegations were immediately dismissed by Trump as "completely fake news".
Ahead of Tuesday's vote, the Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee expressed concern that making the returns public could set a precedent that would undermine Americans' right to privacy and allow undue scrutiny of political rivals.
The panel's top Republican, Kevin Brady, said in a statement that Democrats would "open the door for partisans in Congress to have nearly unlimited power to target political enemies by obtaining and making public their private tax returns."
Republicans have argued that Democrats' stated rationale for looking at the returns to help review the Internal Revenue Service's procedures for auditing presidents is misleading.
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Democrats claim this is not political, but their hurried, ineffective process of releasing the results shows that their motivations are indeed political, he said in a statement.
Except for Gerald Ford, who only released a summary of his tax return, every president from Richard Nixon to Trump's predecessor Barack Obama released his full tax return to the public.
