Government

After SCOTUS Green Light, Mazars Finally Hands Over Trump's Bigly Amazing Tax Returns

He probably fought so hard to keep them hidden out of, ummm, modesty.

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Former president Trump has said a lot of crazy sh*t about his taxes. In 2011, he tied them to the racist birther conspiracy, saying, “I’d love to give my tax returns. I may tie my tax returns into Obama’s birth certificate.”

In 2016 he said, “I’m under a routine audit, and it’ll be released. And as soon as the audit is finished, it will be released.”

“Maybe I’ll release them after I’m finished because I’m very proud of them actually,” Trump said in 2017. “I did a good job.”

In fact, Trump fought tooth and nail to prevent his returns from ever becoming public, enlisting the Justice Department to take positions on executive immunity so farcical that even Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch couldn’t keep a straight face. And on Monday, Trump ran out of road when the Supreme Court refused to entertain his argument that New York’s grand jury subpoena is illegal because Cyrus Vance doesn’t like him. (More or less.)

NBC was first to report that Mazars, Trump’s former accounting company, had forwarded “millions of pages” of financial records to the Manhattan District Attorney within hours of SCOTUS’s order list being published.

“As we have maintained throughout this process, Mazars will comply with all its legal and professional obligations,” a spokesman for the company told the Washington Post. FTI Consulting, the forensic accounting firm retained by the District Attorney to pore over the former president’s records looking for illegalities, will have their work cut out for them.

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And now … we wait. Maybe there will be evidence of rampant criminality in those returns. Or maybe everything is by the book and Trump just tried to hide them because he’s given away so much money to charity that he didn’t want to embarrass Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg for their paltry donations. (Yeah, probably not.)

But in the meantime, as Vance pointed out in his response to Trump’s certiorari motion, the New York Times has already seen the returns and published a whole series of articles about them. So whatever happens with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we already know that Trump is about to face a day of reckoning with the Joint Committee on Taxation, the bipartisan congressional panel tasked with reviewing all IRS refunds to individuals which exceed $2 million.

According to the Times, Trump took full advantage — and maybe more — of a 2011 change in the tax law which allowed him to harvest old losses and claim a $72 million refund on the theory that he’d abandoned his entire $700 million interest in a failed Atlantic City casino and was entitled to write off the whole thing as a loss. Except, according to the Times, he retained a 5 percent stake in the property after it emerged from bankruptcy, meaning he might not have been entitled to get any of it back — there is no such thing as partial “abandonment.”

In his book, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen describes Trump showing him a $10 million check and laughing, “Can you believe how fucking stupid the IRS is? Who would give me a refund of 10-fucking-million-dollars? They are so stupid!”

But perhaps he spoke too soon. The Times suggests that the Service noticed that little discrepancy when it did the preparatory investigation for the JCT. And while Steve Mnuchin might have been willing to intervene to stet the issue, it seems unlikely that Treasury Secretary Yellen will continue to do the same.

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So if the IRS decides that Trump claimed an improper refund, he can either sue the service, which would make the entire return public, or cough up the $100 million for improper state and federal refunds plus interest and penalties. And that’s got nothing to do with Cy Vance or Letitia James.

Sucks to be a civilian!

Trump’s tax returns have been turned over to Manhattan district attorney [WaPo]
LONG-CONCEALED RECORDS SHOW TRUMP’S CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE [NYT]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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