The New York Times is out with a huge scoop and somehow obtained thousands of tax returns for President Trump and related entities going back “more than two decades”:
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
So, who leaked it? The NYT said it was someone with legal access to the information:
All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it. While most of the tax data has not previously been made public, The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records previously obtained by The Times.
This excerpt on how little the president paid in taxes over the past 15 years is what we’re seeing most blue-checks focus on right now, but. . .
2. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the WH, he paid another $750
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing more money than he madehttps://t.co/wAZnwT02Ap
— Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) September 27, 2020
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. . .the reason he paid no income tax in these years was because of a change in the tax law signed by President Barack Obama wich then generated a $72.9 million refund. LOLOL:
3. In fact, records show that in 2010 he claimed, and received, an income tax refund totaling $72.9 million — all the federal income tax he had paid for 2005 through 2008, plus interest.https://t.co/wAZnwT02Ap
— Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) September 27, 2020
Oh, and the best part? The NYT confirmed that the IRS and the president are, in fact, still arguing about the nature of this refund and that he’s been telling the truth when he says his return is still under audit:
The NYT confirms Trump was telling the truth about being under audit. https://t.co/abF9cV8z4A pic.twitter.com/dF0iuA067e
— Greg Pollowitz (@GPollowitz) September 27, 2020
Thanks, Obama! From the NYT:
But to turn that long arc of failure into a giant refund check, he relied on some deft accounting footwork and an unwitting gift from an unlikely source — Mr. Obama.
Business losses can work like a tax-avoidance coupon: A dollar lost on one business reduces a dollar of taxable income from elsewhere. The types and amounts of income that can be used in a given year vary, depending on an owner’s tax status. But some losses can be saved for later use, or even used to request a refund on taxes paid in a prior year.
Until 2009, those coupons could be used to wipe away taxes going back only two years. But that November, the window was more than doubled by a little-noticed provision in a bill Mr. Obama signed as part of the Great Recession recovery effort. Now business owners could request full refunds of taxes paid in the prior four years, and 50 percent of those from the year before that.
So, which clown in the Obama administration wrote him the $72.9 million check in the first place?
"Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million." https://t.co/n1lHxhixN9
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 27, 2020
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