Dont Take Anything Trumps Lawyers Say About His Tax Returns Seriously [View all]

[Eugene]

Source: Huffington Post

POLITICS 05/12/2017 12:57 pm ET

Don’t Take Anything Trump’s Lawyers Say About His Tax Returns Seriously

Anything except releasing the documents falls short.

By Paul Blumenthal , Ben Walsh

President Donald Trump’s tax lawyers issued a statement on Friday that the White House wants you to take seriously: The president has not received income or taken on any debt or equity from Russian sources over the past 10 years, “with a few exceptions.”

This is not how you construct a credible statement about someone’s finances, let alone a sitting president of the United States.

“With few exceptions” is such an obvious out that it can barely even be called a loophole ― it simply and openly invalidates the denial that precedes it.

Trump has a history of emphatically denying that he has any monetary connection to Russia. In January, he tweeted: “NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” His lawyers’ new admission of the “few exceptions” indicates this blanket denial was false. The letter written by Sherri Dillon and Willie Nelson, Trump’s tax lawyers at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, is dated March 8.

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“This is a bizarre attempt to substitute a prepared communication for public disclosure, which is insufficient for both urgent investigation and repairing the public trust,” John Wonderlich, executive director of the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation, told HuffPost.

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Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-lawyers-taxes-russia_us_5915dec7e4b0fe039b345530