Democrats' conundrum with Trump's taxes

By BENJAMIN GUGGENHEIM

12/05/2022 10:00 AM EST

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ABOUT THOSE TRUMP TAXES: Well, House Ways and Means Committee Democrats finally have access to six years of President Donald Trump’s tax returns and could publicly release them before the chamber turns Republican on Jan. 3. But that doesn't mean it would be wise for them to do so, as Daniel Hemel of New York University School of Law writes.

The conundrum is this: The committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), has maintained throughout the three-and-a-half-year process of trying to obtain the returns that the lawmakers wanted to review the presidential audit program — a Watergate-era procedure that mandates the auditing of the president and vice president’s tax returns every year.

That strategy helped Neal win the litigation over Trump’s returns, Hemel says. Neal argued in the courts that his request was not politically motivated exposure for the sake of exposure, but rather part and parcel of the committee’s efforts to conduct legitimate oversight of the IRS.

However, that line of the argument may hamstring the committee if Democrats want to avoid making it look like they hoodwinked the courts.

Neal — and the “designated agents” that he anointed to review the returns — will need to wade through stacks of paperwork that include not only the Trump returns, but also status reports for any audits of Trump and administrative paper trails associated with each audit.

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