President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he “may release” his current tax returns to the public after the IRS reached a settlement over a leak of his past tax records.
The leaked returns from Trump’s first term “showed I pay a lot of tax,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I may even release my current returns because they show I pay a lot of money.”
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Trump went on to say that the IRS was not allowed to leak his confidential tax returns, which were placed in “lock boxes,” and release them to the “fake news.”
Traditionally, presidents have publicly released their tax returns ever since the Watergate scandal plagued then-President Richard Nixon in 1972. That changed once Trump entered office in 2017. He refused to release his tax returns voluntarily at the time, which led to the leak.
Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton, committed the largest-known data breach in the agency’s history by sharing the tax returns of Trump, his two oldest sons, and their family business with the news media.
Littlejohn was later sentenced to five years in prison for the unauthorized disclosure of tax information to news organizations, including the New York Times.
This week, Trump moved to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS after trying to hold the agency accountable for the leak. The decision came ahead of a court hearing in which the federal judge would have considered dismissing the case on the grounds that Trump oversees the IRS, posing what conservative lawyer Edward Whelan called a “glaring conflict of interest.”
As the lawsuit was dropped, the IRS agreed to a settlement that includes the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that would compensate people who claim to be victims of lawfare under the Biden administration. Many Democrats see the fund as benefiting Trump’s allies, but the Trump administration says no partisan criteria are considered when reviewing claims.
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The settlement also strictly bars the federal government from investigating or prosecuting Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization over their tax issues.
“I released them from the lawsuit, and I guess they made a settlement of some kind,” Trump said of the IRS, adding he “wasn’t involved” in making the settlement. “I could have been involved, but I didn’t choose to be.”
