‘Who would give me a refund?’: Trump bragged about tax avoidance, Cohen says
Donald Trump, a self-described billionaire, only paid $750 dollars of income in his first two years as president and no income tax for many years. Even he couldn’t quite believe what he was getting away with, according to his former lawyer.
“Can you believe how fucking stupid the IRS is?” Cohen quotes Trump as saying at one point in his recent book about his time as Trump’s fixer. “Who would give me a refund of ten fucking million dollars? They are so stupid.” Cohen also adds that Trump “almost certainly illegally evaded” taxes. (Cohen himself pled guilty in 2018 to multiple counts of tax evasion, as well as arranging hush money payments to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.)
These comments add to a larger body of information that suggests Trump regularly sought ways to avoid taxes on his substantial wealth, after the New York Times on Sunday obtained decades' worth of Trump's tax information. According to their analysis, Trump didn’t pay a cent of income tax for 10 of the last 15 years.
Trump has refuted the Times’ reporting, calling it “totally fake news” in a briefing on Sunday, and saying that information on his tax returns would be coming soon. “It’ll all be revealed,” he said in a press conference. “It’s going to come out.”
For years Trump has resisted calls to share his tax returns with the public, usually released as a matter of custom by presidential candidates and officeholders alike, saying the IRS is auditing him and he would release them once the process is done. In 2019, the Trump-appointed IRS commissioner, Charles Retting, said there’s no rule prohibiting him from releasing the return while he’s being audited.
Trump has a history of dubious business dealings, including working with mob-affiliated construction firms and developing projects with authoritarian regimes.
