The White House said Wednesday that it has no plans to release President Trump’s tax returns after a New York Times story charged him with using “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud” to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars from his father’s real-estate company.
“I’m not aware of any plans” to release Trump’s tax returns, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters at Wednesday’s briefing. She added that “a number of his taxes are still under audit.”
“The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s,” the Times story said. The report also found that Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was worried that Trump might fritter away the family’s hard-earned fortune on creditors and failing businesses, and reportedly took legal action to protect his assets from the future president.
“The New York Times’ allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false,” Trump lawyer Charles Harder said in a statement to the paper. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which the Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”
“President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” Harder added. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”
The New York Department of Taxation and Finance is looking into the details described in the story.
“The Tax Department is reviewing the allegations in the New York Times article and is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation,” a spokesman for the Department told Bloomberg.
Trump himself lashed out at the Times on Wednesday, saying the newspaper had “never recovered from [its] bad election call,” referring to the Times‘s prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election.
The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen done before. They used the concept of “time value of money” in doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me. Added up, this means that 97% of their stories on me are bad. Never recovered from bad election call!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2018