- LAST MINUTE: The authorities ordered the delivery of the former president’s statements
- Just when this happens, it reveals a ‘dark secret’ of Donald Trump
- Trump’s remarks could ‘finally’ be made public
Trump’s tax returns will be delivered to Congress and the former president’s ‘dark secret’ is discovered. The United States Department of the Treasury received an order to deliver several tax returns from former President Donald Trump to Congress.
The foregoing brings the possibility of those records of Trump’s money being made public, says Efe. In a report, the Department of Justice determined that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which depends on the Treasury, must turn over those Trump financial records to a committee of the House of Representatives.
Trump’s tax returns to Congress to be delivered
“The legal status on this issue is clear: the secretary (of the Treasury) ‘must provide’ the requested tax information if he receives a ‘written request’ from the chairman of one of the three Congressional committees that oversee taxes,” wrote Dawn. Johnsen, of the office of the legal adviser of the Department of Justice, according to Efe.
Trump was the first American president since Gerald Ford (1974-1977) not to publish his tax return each year, a tradition that his predecessors considered part of his duty of transparency and accountability to the people.
Treasury secretary refused to release Trump’s tax returns
In 2019, the Democratic majority on the House Ways and Means committee requested Trump’s six-year tax returns. The committee wanted to obtain these documents to investigate the finances of the then president.
Likewise, they sought to identify their possible conflicts of interest, but the then Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, refused to provide them, Efe points out. That fight sparked litigation that is still active in court.
“Access to former President Trump’s tax returns is a national security issue”
However, the position of the Department of Justice, in charge of defending the Government in the US courts, promises to pave the way for its resolution and for the delivery of Trump’s tax returns to Congress.
“Access to the tax returns of former President Trump is a matter of national security,” said this Friday the speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, in a statement obtained by Efe. Pelosi celebrated the Justice Department’s decision
Are you hiding something? Trump refused to release his tax returns from the start
Americans “deserve to know the facts of the worrisome conflicts of interest” that Trump may have incurred while in office, said Nancy Pelosi. Since his first election campaign, Trump has refused to publish his tax returns.
The foregoing with the argument that it was subject to an audit by the IRS, although numerous legal experts assured that no rule prevented him from having disclosed them if he had wanted to. The Justice Department’s decision comes a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Trump to turn over his tax returns to a prosecutor investigating his finances in New York.
They reveal why they had not been delivered
In a memorandum, the Office of Legal Counsel said that the commission’s chairman had “invoked sufficient reasons to request the former president’s tax returns” and that under federal law “the Treasury must provide the information to the panel,” notes The Associated Press. .
The 39-page memo is signed by Dawn Johnsen, appointed by the Biden administration as interim head of the office of legal counsel. During the Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he would not release the information because he concluded that it had been requested by Democrats in control of the lower house for partisan reasons.
The IRS “must turn over” Trump’s tax returns
The panel sued to obtain the documents under a federal law that says the Internal Revenue Service “must turn over” the tax returns of any taxpayer to a handful of high-ranking legislators. The panel said it needed Trump’s documents for an investigation into whether he complied with the law.
Trump’s Justice Department defended Mnuchin’s refusal and Trump himself intervened to try to prevent the materials from being turned over to Congress. Under a January court order, Trump would have 72 hours to object after the Joe Biden administration formally changes the government’s position on the lawsuit, the AP notes.
Trump’s dark secret comes to light
Trump tried to prevent his accountants from turning over the documents, taking the matter to the Supreme Court. The justices rejected Trump’s argument that he enjoyed broad immunity as president of the United States.
In addition, this Friday a ‘dark secret’ of former president Donald Trump was also unveiled. When he was president, Donald Trump phoned senior Justice Department officials to ask for the ‘unthinkable’ according to The Associated Press.
He asked to do the ‘unthinkable’ in the elections
Trump would have asked them to declare that the 2020 presidential election was “corrupt,” according to handwritten notes by one of the participants in the conversation. The December 27 notes were released on Friday by the House of Representatives Commission for the Supervision and Reform of the Government.
These notes highlight how far Donald Trump went to try to overturn the results of the election in which he lost to Joe Biden and to win the backing of law enforcement officials and other government leaders in that effort, The Associated Press says.
“Leave the rest to me,” Trump said.
Emails released last month show that Trump and his allies in the final weeks of his presidency lobbied the Justice Department to investigate baseless allegations of voter fraud in 2020 and the department’s inspector general is examining whether officials tried to subvert the results.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, according to notes taken by Richard Donoghue, a senior department official who was present at the conversation. .
He asked to annul a “clean and fair” election
The pressures are all the more remarkable because just weeks before, Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, had stated that the department found no evidence of fraud that could overturn the results, the AP notes.
“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law and order agency to take steps to overturn a fair and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” said the chair of the commission, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, in a statement, obtained by the AP.