Mick Mulvaney rewrites history, claims Trump never promised to release his tax returns

The White House might want you to forget about it now, but before and during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to release his tax returns.

In 2014, Trump said that if he “decide[s] to run for office, I’ll produce my tax returns. Absolutely. I would love to do that.” In 2015 — months before launching his presidential campaign — Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that “I would release tax returns ... I have no objection to certainly showing tax returns.”

Candidate Trump reiterated that vow during the first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton with a now-familiar caveat, saying, “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished, it will be released.”

Trump, of course, never followed through. He continues to cite an audit that seems poised to outlast any of our natural lifetimes as the reason he won’t release his tax returns. But now that House Ways and Means Committee Chair Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) has formally asked the IRS to turn them over, the White House is pretending like Trump never said he’d release them at all.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney vowed that Democrats will “never” see Trump’s tax returns, and characterized the issue as one “that was already litigated during the election.”

“Voters knew Trump could’ve given his tax returns, they knew that he didn’t, and they elected him anyway,” Mulvaney said.

But that was not what Trump told voters. He promised them he would release his returns, pending completion of an audit — not that he wouldn’t do it at all.

Not only was Mulvaney rewriting history about Trump’s past statements on his tax returns, but he downplayed the interest Americans have in seeing his returns. A Washington Post/ABC poll conducted in January found that 60 percent of people want the new House Democratic majority to do what it’s now trying to do: obtain them.

The IRS routinely audits the tax returns of all sitting presidents and vice presidents. Neal framed the request he made to the IRS for Trump’s tax returns around an interest in making sure the government is doing its job.

“The IRS has a policy of auditing the tax returns of all sitting presidents and vice-presidents, yet little is known about the effectiveness of this program,” Neal wrote in a statement released after he formally requested Trump’s tax returns. “On behalf of the American people, the Ways and Means Committee must determine if that policy is being followed, and, if so, whether these audits are conducted fully and appropriately. In order to fairly make that determination, we must obtain President Trump’s tax returns and review whether the IRS is carrying out its responsibilities.”

Trump has already signaled that he won’t cooperate with Neal’s request. On Friday, an attorney representing the president, William Consovoy, sent a letter to the Treasury Department objecting to Neal’s request on the grounds that “[i]t would be a gross abuse of power for the majority party to use tax returns as a weapon to attack, harass, and intimidate their political opponents. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, the ensuing tit-for-tat will do lasting damage to our nation.”

Unsurprisingly, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has already indicated he’ll block Democratic efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns, which sets the stage for the matter to be fought in the courts.

Mulvaney seems to reflect other Republicans’ sentiments on this issue. During an interview on Sunday’s Meet the Press, onetime Trump critic Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called Neal’s efforts “moronic,” and opined that “[t]he courts are not going to say you can compel a person running for office to release their tax returns. So he’s going to win this victory. He wins them time after time.”

Like Mulvaney, Romney’s comments represented a bit of a reversal from the 2016 campaign, when he said Trump’s tax returns likely contained a “bombshell.” (When Romney was the Republican nominee for president, he released his tax returns, doing so, interestingly, after former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested the Republican might have something to hide.)

“The reason that I think that there’s a bombshell in there is because every time he’s asked about his taxes he dodges and delays and says well, we’re working on it,” Romney said during a Fox News interview in February 2016. “I think there’s something there.”

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