Trump's tax returns show he was a bigger security risk than we realized
Last month the House Ways and Means Committee published six years of former President Trump’s tax returns — documents that should have been released years earlier, whether by Trump voluntarily, or by congressional subpoena. As Norman Eisen, Danya Perry and I have explained, we learned a lot from Trump’s tax returns. Among the pages and pages of revelations, it is the new details about his foreign entanglements that are most frightening from the vantage point of our national security.
The tax returns reveal that Trump had foreign bank accounts from 2015 to 2020. These include a bank account in China from 2015 to 2017, which reportedly is connected to Trump International Hotels Management business in China. The tax returns also showed that Trump had business dealings in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Grenada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Qatar, South Korea, St. Maarten, St. Vincent, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
The drafters of our Constitution were well aware of the threat of foreign influence over U.S. office holders when they wrote the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits anyone holding a position of trust with the United States government from receiving any emoluments — i.e. profits and benefits — from any foreign state. As Eisen, Laurence Tribe and I explained before the beginning of the Trump presidency, he was likely in violation of the Emoluments Clause on the day he took office.
Soon after, the three of us were representing plaintiffs in one of several lawsuits against Trump alleging breaches of the emoluments clause. The cases were tied up in the federal courts for almost three years over questions of standing — the right to sue. The protracted battles delayed discovery in these cases, meaning nobody was able to find out where Trump and his companies were getting their money from. Even after the courts allowed some of the lawsuits to go forward, by the time discovery began Trump was leaving office. The Supreme Court in 2021 dismissed the cases as moot because Trump had left office. We never did find out which foreign governments were paying Trump while he was in office and how much. The former president, of course, denied all charges of improper conduct.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-tax-returns-show-he-was-a-bigger-security-risk-than-we-realized/ar-AA16b2Kh
