Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Tuesday he will be releasing 10 years’ worth of tax returns in the next week and admitted he himself is one of the millionaires he has decried throughout his political life.
The Democratic presidential candidate, who has been ridiculed in the past for owning extra properties including a beachfront home in New England, said in an interview with the New York Times that he will be releasing the tax returns in the spirit of transparency.
“April 15 is coming,” Sanders said in the interview. “We wanted to release 10 years of tax returns. April 15, 2019, will be the 10th year, so I think you will see them.”
During the 2016 campaign, when he faced off against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders released his 2014 tax returns, which was sparse compared with the eight years of tax returns Clinton made public.
Sanders also urged Trump to release his tax returns, saying the American people want to know where he stands financially. He also said that his own tax returns won’t be as salacious as Trump’s.
“On the day in the very immediate future, certainly before April 15, we release ours, I hope that Donald Trump will do exactly the same. We are going to release 10 years of our tax returns, and we hope that on that day Donald Trump will do the same,” Sanders said. “Not being a billionaire, not having investments in Saudi Arabia, wherever he has investments, all over the world, mine will be a little bit more boring.”
In an interview last week on “The Daily Show,” Sanders was confronted by host Trevor Noah about his hesitance to release his tax returns as other 2020 candidates have already done. Noah quipped that typically politicians who refuse to make their tax returns public are attempting to hide something from the American voters.
“If Bernie hasn’t released them and Trump hasn’t released them, there’s probably secrets on both sides,” Noah told Sanders. “My theory is Trump doesn’t want us to know that he’s not a billionaire and you don’t want us to know that you are.”
Sanders has made taxing “the millionaires and billionaires” a central component of his presidential campaigns, both in 2016 and 2020, blaming the rich for ruining the American economy. “We will no longer tolerate 46 percent of all new income going to the very richest people in this country,” Sanders said in his campaign kickoff last month.
The Vermont lawmaker currently sits in second place for the Democratic nomination, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average. He trails former Vice President Joe Biden, who has yet to announce a presidential run, by 8.6 percentage points.
[Opinion: Bernie Sanders became a millionaire by becoming America’s most famous socialist]
