House committee votes to release Trump's tax returns
Sylvie Claire / December 22, 2022
U.S. elected officials voted Tuesday to release the tax returns of former Republican President Donald Trump, who has waged a years-long legal battle to keep them private.
Before the vote, elected Democrats had not ruled out making these tax forms public immediately upon approval, but the exact date of publication was not yet known immediately after the vote.
Donald Trump, who has entered a new race for the White House in 2024, had not made his tax returns known, unlike all his predecessors since the 1970s, raising many questions about their content.
A committee of the House of Representatives, which sits on tax matters and had a Democratic majority until the installation of the new Republican majority in early January, voted 24 to 16 in favour of releasing the billionaire's six years of tax returns between 2015 and 2020.
This group of elected officials had been demanding for three years the documents transmitted to the tax authorities by the billionaire between those years, which he refused. The Supreme Court finally agreed with them at the end of November.
Only a handful of elected officials have so far been able to see them.
The lack of transparency of Donald Trump, who made his wealth a campaign argument, has fueled speculation for years about the extent of his wealth or potential conflicts of interest.
His family business, the Trump Organization, was convicted in early December of financial and tax fraud after a trial in New York where the former Republican president was not on trial.
Kevin Brady, a Republican elected official on the committee, warned before the vote that possible publication would "open the door" for lawmakers "to have almost unlimited powers to go after their political enemies by obtaining and making public their private tax returns."
"While Democrats insist this is not political," continued a statement from Republican elected officials, "their willingness to release the documents with a rushed, sloppy process shows that their motives are indeed political."