President Donald Trump on Sunday dismissed as “totally fake news” a New York Times report about how little he has paid in federal taxes.
“It’s fake news,” Trump told reporters at a news conference in the White House briefing room. “It’s totally fake news. Made up. Fake.”
The Times obtained more than two decades of Trump’s tax information and reported earlier on Sunday that the president paid only $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, the year he won the presidency and his first year in the White House.
“He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made,” the report said, noting that more articles on his taxes would be published in the coming weeks.
Trump on Sunday reprised his long-held argument that he can’t release his taxes because he’s under audit by the IRS, an agency he claimed treats him “very badly.” But the president said he would be “proud to show” his tax returns once the audit was over, and insisted that he’d paid “a lot” of money in taxes, including New York state income taxes.
“It’ll all be revealed,” Trump said. “It’s gonna come out — but after the audit.”
“The story,” he added, “is a total fake.”
Former IRS officials, however, have disputed Trump's claim and said there‘s nothing stopping the president from releasing his taxes during an audit.
“From our standpoint, if you’re being audited, and you want to do something else, share that information with your returns, you can do that," then-IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in 2016.
The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who has taken his fight for access to six years‘ worth of Trump's tax returns to the Supreme Court, responded to the reporting on Sunday evening, saying Trump “gamed the tax code to his advantage.“
“This reporting shines a stark light on the vastly different experience people with power and influence have when interacting with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) than the average American taxpayer does,“ Neal said in a statement. “Our case is very strong, and we will ultimately prevail.“
Evan Semones contributed to this report.
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