Donald Trump has been fighting the release of his tax returns since he first positioned himself as a presidential candidate, and MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski said their long-awaited disclosure proves he was always lying about them.
Trump claimed the returns couldn’t be released during his 2016 campaign — and throughout his presidency — because they were under audit, but the House Ways and Means Committee concluded the IRS failed to audit his taxes, as required under a mandatory presidential program, for the first two years of his term and did not complete any of them.
“It proves that Hillary Clinton, was right all along,” Brzezinski said. “Nancy Pelosi was right all along, Chuck Schumer was right all along. The Democrats were right all along. Reporting from the New York Times was right all along, Washington Post, too, was 100 percent correct all along. Donald Trump was not under audit. Donald Trump was lying. He was desperate to hide the truth from Americans.”
“That truth, that far from being a shrewd businessman, he was, in fact, the biggest loser out of the 300 million Americans who filed their taxes with the IRS,” she added. “The man lost more money than any other American, at a time when he was writing “The Art of the Deal,” this was happening, and worse than that, the fact his own Treasury Department under the bumbling hands of Steve Mnuchin refused to audit the president after Trump got into the White House — that’s usually done. So that lie continued and continued and continued until last night.”
Trump installed a loyalist as IRS commissioner in 2018 who had publicly defended his refusal to make public his tax returns, and that former official will likely be called to testify before the U.S. Senate after Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) called for legislation to codify mandatory audits for presidents.
“Republicans have definitely laid their bet — they stand, some of them, by Donald Trump through dinners with Kanye West and white nationalists and stolen documents and saying the Constitution should be, whatever, redacted, gotten rid of,” Brzezinski said. “It doesn’t matter, but he was — it does prove he was lying from the get-go. Will it move the meter?”
Watch the segment below or at this link.