But that Trump did 26 of these shows how determined he was to thumb his nose at the law.Īnd Trump has always done this. If you go on for five years, the IRS will almost always declare that this is a hobby, and the taxpayers aren’t going to subsidize your hobby. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Cay Johnston, for those people who are not familiar with these Schedule Cs, what are the IRS regulations about being able to have a business that has no income but has all kinds of expenses? And how long can that go on before the IRS normally has a red flag to go after you?ĭAVID CAY JOHNSTON: You can start up a business and have expenses to start up, but you have to show that you were attempting to make a profit. And that, I think, is the most brazen thing in there. For those 26 returns, where he was on notice that it’s illegal to create a fictitious business and take deductions, he could easily be prosecuted, either by the federal government or Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, for cheating on state taxes the same way.
There were a handful of others where the income and the expenses, exactly to the dollar, equaled out, which is impossible to believe is anything but manipulation. Twenty-six of them had zero revenue and hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses. So, what turns up in these six years of tax returns? Well, he filed 65 of Schedule Cs. The judges wrote scathing opinions about what he was doing. Auditors from the City of New York and the state of New York spotted that, disallowed it. And on it, he showed no revenue but over $600,000 of expenses. It’s what I use for my book writing business. He filed a tax return that included something called a Schedule C. So he had Amazons of cash flowing into his pockets. That was the year Trump Tower was selling apartments like crazy and his first casino opened. Talk about what you found most significant, what you were most surprised by in these latest tax releases.ĭAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, that Donald used a number of legal devices to reduce taxes is no surprise.
David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, his most recent book titled The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family, also wrote Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else.ĭavid, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Congress.ĪMY GOODMAN: In fact, our next guest says the tax returns show Trump took tax losses he knew were fraudulent and that Trump knowingly committed brazen tax fraud. The radical Democrats’ behavior is a shame upon the U.S. Trump responded to the release in a video statement.ĭONALD TRUMP: These tax returns contain relatively little information and not information that almost anybody would understand. They also showed the tax law Trump signed in late 2017 opened new opportunities for him, and disclosed income from a wide range of foreign countries, including Canada, Panama, the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, the Philippines, United Arab Emirates, China and Britain. In his last year in office, 2020, he paid no federal taxes. The records reveal Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes during his first year in office in 2017. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.Īfter years of legal battles between former President Donald Trump and Congress, the House Ways and Means Committee released six years of Trump’s tax returns Friday, including thousands of documents from the years he ran for president and was in office. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,, The War and Peace Report.
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