Donald Trump’s tax returns expected to be released by House on Friday

Tax Day is coming early for Donald Trump.

A Democratic-controlled House committee is expected to release six years’ worth of tax returns from the former president on Friday.

The House Ways and Means Committee, which is due to shift into Republican hands when the upcoming Congress begins in five days, voted last week to make the documents public.

The move promises scrutiny of Trump’s finances that the former president has vigorously fought. The panel already published a 39-page report on Trump’s tax documents.

Norman Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow who worked as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, said the detailed returns could still offer new revelations.

“The House report was a summary, but when you get the actual returns, you have additional context on issues like the question of whether income is artificially inflated,” Eisen said.

He said that he would sift through the tax papers with an eye out for areas including tax fraud and broader business fraud.

Earlier this month, the Trump Organization, the former president’s family business, was found guilty of tax fraud after a trial in Manhattan Supreme Court. Trump did not face charges in that case.

The expected release of Trump’s tax papers comes after a long-running battle that began when the panel first sought the materials in 2019.

Trump’s legal team took the matter to the Supreme Court, arguing in a court filing that the committee had asked the Internal Revenue Service for the tax returns in an effort to expose the documents to the public “for the sake of exposure.”

But the former president failed to persuade a conservative Supreme Court that includes three justices he nominated. On Nov. 22, the court cleared the way for the committee to receive the papers.

“The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform after the decision, adding that the court “has become nothing more than a political body.”

Federal law authorizes the Ways and Means Committee to demand that the IRS provide any taxpayer’s returns.

“There was just very little legal uncertainty around this,” Noah Feldman, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said of the case last month.

Last week, the Ways and Means Committee said it had found that the IRS failed to conduct mandatory audits of Trump during the first two years of his presidency.

“The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies,” Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the panel, said in a statement.

“However, our review found that under the prior Administration the program was dormant,” said Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat. “We know now, the first mandatory audit was opened two years into his presidency.”

The IRS did not begin the program until the day that the panel asked for the records, Neal said.

A spokeswoman for Trump, Liz Harrington, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the expected tax document dump.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, tweeted Wednesday that all candidates for federal office “should have their tax returns automatically released.”

“Then we wouldn’t have had to spend so long chasing down Donald Trump’s,” she wrote.