As the Republican nominee in 2016, Donald Trump repeatedly promised that he, like every other Oval Office contender in recent memory, would release his tax returns. As we now know, he likely had no intention of doing so.
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In fact, Trump has fought tooth and nail to keep his tax records hidden—from prosecutors, Congress, and the American people—only to be ruled against, in the end, by the right-wing Supreme Court he helped seat.
On December 30, the House Ways and Means Committee released six years of Trump's tax returns to the public. A good chunk of the populace is dying to know what dark secrets may lurk in those documents.
The Trumps have long been associated with fraud, after all. As president, in April 2018, Donald Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit against Trump University, a scammy house-flipping seminar operation that then–New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said defrauded thousands of people. Six months later, the New York Times published a blockbuster investigation detailing years of tax dodging and "outright fraud" by the Trump family. Last month, the Trump Organization was found guilty of criminal tax fraud, although Trump himself was not charged.
Now that the public has finally gotten its grubby mitts on Trump's taxes, some very smart people are combing through them, and few are better suited than veteran tax attorney Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center who has served both in private practice and in the federal government, helping Congress draft tax policy for financial institutions, financial products, and capital gains, among other things.
In the latest episode of the Talking Feds podcast, excerpted below with permission, Rosenthal talks with host-creator Harry Litman—a law professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general under Janet Reno during the 1990s, and then as the US attorney for Western Pennsylvania. —about what makes Trump's returns look janky, the legal perils the former president might face, and whether the IRS, which House Republicans neutered a decade ago and are preparing to neuter again, has a fighting chance against unscrupulous rich people and their white-shoes tax lawyers.