Squabble Over Trump's Tax Returns Rages, White House Responds With a No
Despite promises to do so once a supposed audit was completed, Donald Trump will not release his tax returns now that he is President.
Kellyanne Conway, senior counselor to President Donald Trump, announced on Sunday that he will not be releasing his tax returns -- a move that plunges the Trump administration into allegations of conflicts of interest and one that breaks a 40-year tradition started by Richard Nixon.
During his campaign, Trump had announced that he was not releasing his tax returns as he was under an IRS audit, and that he would do so once it was completed. When he failed to follow through, a Whitehouse.gov petition calling on Trump to release his tax returns was started. Any petition on the site receiving 100,000 signatures in 30 days requires an official White House response; the petition calling for the release of Trump's tax returns received 200,000 signatures in just two days.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Speaking on ABC News' Sunday morning show "This Week", Kellyanne Conway stated the administration's riling response to the petition: "The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns," Conway told the show's host George Stephanopoulos. "We litigated this all through the election."
"People didn't care," Conway brazenly added. "They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are -- very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like."
Her statements -- tantamount to blatant lies -- are sure to infuriate the 74 percent of Americans (including 53 percent of Republicans) who want to view Trump's tax returns. By not disclosing the documents, the new administration has left itself vulnerable to allegations that foreign investments in Trump's businesses put the new President in conflict with the emoluments clause of the Constitution. The American public now has no way of finding out whether the administration's policies are being enacted for the people's benefit or for Trump's personal gain.
Besides the tax returns, Trump hasn't released the documents verifying the transfer of ownership and control of his businesses either. In a debacle of a press conference Trump conducted in New York on January 11, he displayed a large stack of papers which were supposedly documents that transferred "complete and total control" of his businesses to his two sons and another longtime employee. However, their authenticity could not be verified as he refused to let the assembled journalists inspect them.
The only authoritative body that can force the disclosure of Trump's financial records is the United States Congress -- in which the Republicans, who are in a Trump stranglehold, have an overwhelming majority.
However, Americans may find a champion in WikiLeaks -- the very group praised by Trump for releasing the Democratic National Committee's emails which effectively destroyed Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign. Stating that Trump's refusal to release his financial information is worse than Clinton's concealment of her Goldman Sachs transcripts, the anti-privacy group tweeted yesterday: "Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway stated today that Trump will not release his tax returns. Send them to: https://wikileaks.org/#submit so we can."
