A week after Barack Obama challenged Hillary Clintonto release her 2006 income-tax returns, she is coming under increasing pressure to make the document public. The New York Times, the country’s most powerful liberal voice, said in an editorial Friday that the public was entitled to details of the $5 million loan to her own campaign, as well as her husband’s murky business dealings.
“Release of the tax returns should not be made conditional on winning the nomination, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has made it,” argued the Times, which has endorsed Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
The Times also called on the Republican presumptive nominee John McCain, who was also endorsed by the newspaper, to release his 2006 tax returns.
Both McCain and Clinton have promised to make the information available after the nomination process is over.
But neither campaign responded to requests for comment about the editorial or about when, exactly, they would make the tax returns public.
When pressed in a recent interview, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson refused to say why the New York senator has not released them.
Prominent Obama backers said the undisclosed tax returns demonstrate a larger transparency problem with the Clintons stemming back to Bill Clinton’s presidency and reaching into her own White House bid.
“President Clinton has not disclosed who are the contributors to his presidential library when he was in office,” former New Jersey senator and Obama supporter Bill Bradley said Friday.
The Times editorial also called on Bill Clinton to reveal his library donations.
“It would be better for her to release them than not to show she has nothing to hide,” said Democratic political analyst Simon Rosenberg.
Campaign aides said Clinton did not have to secure the loan of the $5 million she gave her own campaign and pointed out that she has earned millions for her best-selling autobiography. But she paid a hefty tax bill on her book fee and is believed to have spent a considerable sum on her home in the fashionable Kalorama section of Washington.
According to disclosure forms she is required to file as a U.S senator, the Clintons share assets valued between $10 million and $50 million, a much less specific figure than would be revealed by tax returns.
Campaign finance laws permit Clinton to use up to half of the joint assets she shares with her husband, so that raises the question of whether any of the money came from Bill Clinton’s share of the bank account.
Bill Clinton has earned millions in speaking fees, and he also stands to earn tens of millions of dollars from his investment in Yucaipa, an investment firm run by his friend and Hillary Clinton fundraiser Ron Burkle. The firm has conducted some controversial business deals that have been an embarrassment to the former president, according to news reports, and he is in the process of severing ties with the business.
