Thread: Trump Tax Records Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for 2 Decades

Trump Tax Records Obtained by The Times Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades

By DAVID BARSTOW, SUSANNE CRAIG, RUSS BUETTNER and MEGAN TWOHEY OCT. 1, 2016

Photo

Donald J. Trump at the New York Stock Exchange in June 1995.CreditKathy Willens/Associated Press

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said tax rules that are especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

Photo1995 tax returns obtained by The New York Times." data-mediaviewer-credit="" itemprop="url" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/01/us/01TRUMPTAXES-DOC-RIP-SUB/01TRUMPTAXES-DOC-RIP-SUB-master675.jpg" style="height: auto; max-width: 100%; display: block; width: 600px;">

A line from one of Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns obtained by The New York Times.Although Mr. Trump’s taxable income in subsequent years is as yet unknown, a $916 million loss in 1995 would have been large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos.

Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.

“He has a vast benefit from his destruction” in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Mr. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Mr. Trump’s: “Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?”

Mr. Trump declined to comment on the documents. Instead, the campaign released a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss.

“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the statement said. “That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”

The statement continued: “Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”

DOCUMENT

Donald Trump’s Letter

In response to a Times article revealing pages of his 1995 income tax records, Mr. Trump said, “The only news here is that the more than 20 year-old alleged tax document was illegally obtained.”

OPEN DOCUMENT

Separately, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Marc E. Kasowitz, emailed a letter to The Times arguing that publication of the records is illegal because Mr. Trump has not authorized the disclosure of any of his tax returns. Mr. Kasowitz threatened “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action.”

Mr. Trump’s refusal to make his tax returns public — breaking with decades of tradition in presidential contests — has emerged as a central issue in the campaign, with a majority of voters saying he should release them. Mr. Trump has declined to do so, and has said he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

At last Monday’s presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton suggested Mr. Trump was refusing to release his tax returns so voters would not know “he’s paid nothing in federal taxes,” and when she also pointed out that Mr. Trump had once revealed to casino regulators that he had paid no federal income taxes in the late 1970s, Mr. Trump retorted: “That makes me smart.”
ELECTION 2016 By SHANE O’NEILL and AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER 1:11Donald Trump’s Taxes



Video Donald Trump’s Taxes

Donald Trump has continued to decline to release his tax returns despite mounting pressure from both Democrats and Republicans.

A look at some of the explanations for keeping his taxes private.
By SHANE O’NEILL and AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER on Publish DateOctober 1, 2016. Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

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The tax experts consulted by The Times said nothing in the 1995 documents suggested any wrongdoing by Mr. Trump, even if the extraordinary size of the loss he declared would have probably triggered extra scrutiny from Internal Revenue Service examiners. “The I.R.S., when they see a negative $916 million, that has to pop out,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.

The documents examined by The Times represent a small fraction of the voluminous tax returns Mr. Trump would have filed in 1995.

DOCUMENT

Pages From Donald Trump’s 1995 Income Tax Records

The tax records obtained by The Times show that Donald J. Trump claimed a $916 million loss that could have allowed him to legally avoid paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

OPEN DOCUMENT

The documents consisted of three pages from what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The pages were mailed last month to Susanne Craig, a reporter at The Times who has written about Mr. Trump’s finances. The documents were the first page of a New York State resident income tax return, the first page of a New Jersey nonresident tax return and the first page of a Connecticut nonresident tax return. Each page bore the names and Social Security numbers of Mr. Trump and Marla Maples, his wife at the time. Only the New Jersey form had what appeared to be their signatures.

The three documents arrived by mail at The Times with a postmark indicating they had been sent from New York City. The return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.

On Wednesday, The Times presented the tax documents to Jack Mitnick, a lawyer and certified public accountant who handled Mr. Trump’s tax matters for more than 30 years, until 1996. Mr. Mitnick was listed as the preparer on the New Jersey tax form.

Mr. Mitnick, 80, now semiretired and living in Florida, said that while he no longer had access to Mr. Trump’s original returns, the documents appeared to be authentic copies of portions of Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns. Mr. Mitnick said the signature on the tax preparer line of the New Jersey tax form was his, and he readily explained an obvious anomaly in the way especially large numbers appeared on the New York tax document.
A flaw in the tax software program he used at the time prevented him from being able to print a nine-figure loss on Mr. Trump’s New York return, he said. So, for example, the loss of “-915,729,293” on Line 18 of the return printed out as “5,729,293.” As a result, Mr. Mitnick recalled, he had to use his typewriter to manually add the “-91,” thus explaining why the first two digits appeared to be in a different font and were slightly misaligned from the following seven digits.

“This is legit,” he said, stabbing a finger into the document.

Donald Trump’s Taxes: What We Know and Don’t Know

In the absence of any disclosures from Mr. Trump, The New York Times and other news outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps.



Because the documents sent to The Times did not include any pages from Mr. Trump’s 1995 federal tax return, it is impossible to determine how much he may have donated to charity that year. The state documents do show, though, that Mr. Trump declined the opportunity to contribute to the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Fund, the New Jersey Wildlife Conservation Fund or the Children’s Trust Fund. He also declined to contribute $1 toward public financing of New Jersey’s elections for governor.

The tax documents also do not shed any light on Mr. Trump’s claimed net worth of about $2 billion at that time. This is because the complex calculations of business deductions that produced a tax loss of $916 million are a separate matter from how Mr. Trump valued his assets, the tax experts said.

Nor does the $916 million loss suggest that Mr. Trump was insolvent or effectively bankrupt in 1995. The cash flow generated by his various businesses that year was more than enough to service his various debts.

But fragmentary as they are, the documents nonetheless provide new insight into Mr. Trump’s finances, a subject of intense scrutiny given Mr. Trump’s emphasis on his business record during the presidential campaign.

The documents show, for example, that while Mr. Trump reported $7.4 million in interest income in 1995, he made only $6,108 in wages, salaries and tips. They also suggest Mr. Trump took full advantage of generous tax loopholes specifically available to commercial real estate developers to claim a $15.8 million loss in 1995 on his real estate holdings and partnerships.

But the most important revelation from the 1995 tax documents is just how much Mr. Trump may have benefited from a tax provision that is particularly prized by America’s dynastic families, who, like the Trumps, hold their wealth inside byzantine networks of partnerships, limited-liability companies and S corporations.

The provision, known as “net operating loss,” or “N.O.L.,” allows a dizzying array of deductions, business expenses, real estate depreciation, losses from the sale of business assets and even operating losses to flow from the balance sheets of those partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations onto the personal tax returns of men like Mr. Trump. In turn, those losses can then be used to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income from, say, book royalties or branding deals.

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Mr. Trump bought the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan in 1988.CreditMarty Lederhandler/Associated Press

Better still, if the losses are big enough, they can cancel out taxable income earned in other years. Under I.R.S. rules in 1995, net operating losses could be used to wipe out taxable income earned in the three years before and the 15 years after the loss. (The effect of net operating losses on state income taxes varies, depending on each state’s tax regime.)

The tax experts consulted by The Times said the $916 million net operating loss declared by Mr. Trump in 1995 almost certainly included large net operating losses carried forward from the early 1990s, when most of Mr. Trump’s key holdings were hemorrhaging money. Indeed, by 1990, his entire business empire was on the verge of collapse. In a few short years, he had amassed $3.4 billion in debt — personally guaranteeing $832 million of it — to assemble a portfolio that included three casinos and a hotel in Atlantic City, the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, an airline and a huge yacht.

Reports that year by New Jersey casino regulators gave glimpses of the balance sheet carnage. The Trump Taj Mahal casino reported a $25.5 million net loss during its first six months of 1990; the Trump’s Castle casino lost $43.5 million for the year. His airline, Trump Shuttle, lost $34.5 million during just the first six months of that year.

“Simply put, the organization is in dire financial straits,” the casino regulators concluded.

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Reports published by New Jersey regulators in 1993, top, and 1995, above, highlighted the effects of Mr. Trump’s net operating losses.Reports by New Jersey’s casino regulators strongly suggested that Mr. Trump had claimed large net operating losses on his taxes in the early 1990s. Their reports, for example, revealed that Mr. Trump had carried forward net operating losses in both 1991 and 1993. What’s more, the reports said the losses he claimed were large enough to virtually cancel out any taxes he might owe on the millions of dollars of debt that was being forgiven by his creditors. (The I.R.S. considers forgiven debt to be taxable income.)

But crucially, the casino regulators redacted the precise size of the net operating losses in the public versions of their reports. Two former New Jersey officials, who were privy to the unredacted documents, could not recall the precise size of the numbers, but said they were substantial.

Politico, which previously reported that Mr. Trump likely paid no income taxes in 1991 and 1993 based on the casino commission’s description of his net operating losses, asked Mr. Trump to comment. “Welcome to the real estate business,” he replied in an email.

Now, thanks to Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax records, the degree to which he spun all those years of red ink into tax write-off gold may be finally apparent.

Mr. Mitnick was the person Mr. Trump leaned on most to do the spinning. The lawyer and accountant worked for a small Long Island accounting firm that specialized in handling tax issues for wealthy New York real estate families. Mr. Mitnick had long handled tax matters for Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and he said he began doing Donald Trump’s taxes after Mr. Trump turned 18.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Mitnick said he could not divulge details of Mr. Trump’s finances without Mr. Trump’s consent. But he did talk about Mr. Trump’s approaches to taxes, and he contrasted Fred Trump’s attention to detail with what he described as Mr. Trump’s brash and undisciplined style. He recalled, for example, that when Donald and Ivana Trump came in each year to sign their tax forms, it was almost always Ivana who asked the most questions.

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The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, one of the failed casino properties in Atlantic City that had been owned by Mr. Trump.CreditDouglas Graham/Congressional Quarterly, via Getty Images

But if Mr. Trump lacked a sophisticated understanding of the tax code, and if he rarely showed any interest in the details behind various tax strategies, Mr. Mitnick said he clearly grasped the critical role taxes would play in helping him build wealth. “He knew we could use the tax code to protect him,” Mr. Mitnick said.

According to Mr. Mitnick, Mr. Trump’s use of net operating losses was no different from that of his other wealthy clients.

“This may have had a couple extra digits compared to someone else’s operation, but they all benefited in the same way,” he said, pointing to the $916 million loss on Mr. Trump’s tax returns.

In “Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best-selling book, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Mitnick as “my accountant” — although he misspelled his name. Mr. Trump described consulting with Mr. Mitnick on the tax implications of deals he was contemplating and seeking his advice on how new federal tax regulations might affect real estate write-offs.

76COMMENTS“Mr. Mitnick, though, said there were times when even he, for all his years helping wealthy New Yorkers navigate the tax code, found it difficult to face the incongruity of his work for Mr. Trump. He felt keenly aware of the fact that Mr. Trump was living a life of unimaginable luxury thanks in part to Mr. Mitnick’s ability to relieve him of the burden of paying taxes like everyone else.

“Here the guy was building incredible net worth and not paying tax on it,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us...ump-taxes.html

Most Want to See Clinton, Trump Tax Returns, Medical Records

“Here the guy was building incredible net worth and not paying tax on it,” he said.

LOL!! You don't pay income tax on net worth, you pay property tax. You pay income tax on net income, not net worth.

I thought the CORRUPT MEDIA was trying to claim Trump was broke and filed bankruptcy 4 times in the 90's.

The New York Times just published some of Donald Trump's 1995 tax records — here's what they reveal

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a rally on September 30, 2016 in Novi, Michigan. A post-debate poll shows Trump's rival Hillary Clinton with a seven point lead in Michigan.Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Donald Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for 18 years, according to tax recordsobtained by The New York Times and published on Saturday night.

The documents indicated that Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995, providing him with a deduction so large it could have eliminated his obligation to legally pay annual federal taxes by up to $50 million for nearly two decades, tax experts told The Times.

Trump has refused calls to release his tax returns, a decades-old tradition every Republican nominee since Richard Nixon has followed.

At Monday night’s presidential debate, Clinton suggested Trump was perhaps refusing to publicly disclose his tax documents because he had not paid federal taxes. “That makes me smart,” Trump replied, raising eyebrows across the political world.

The Times said it had obtained the documents from an anonymous source who mailed the documents to its offices.

The return address on the envelope was Trump Tower in New York City.

A lawyer for Trump, Marc E. Kasowitz, threatened The Times with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” if it published the documents.

The documents were published by The Times as Trump told a Pennsylvania crowd to “follow the money,” his latest line of attack against Hillary Clinton, in reference to his allegations she was engaged in a pay-to-play scandal while secretary of state.

http://www.businessinsider.com/donal...nyt-no-2016-10

Read the full New York Times story here >

SEE ALSO: Mark Cuban explains why he soured on Donald Trump


NOW WATCH: David Cay Johnston: 'There's no evidence Donald Trump is a billionaire'

Bombshell New York Times Report Reveals Details From Donald Trump's 1995 Tax Records

Trump could have avoided paying federal income taxes for nearly two decades.

KANYAKRIT VONGKIATKAJORN AND JAMES WEST
OCT. 1, 2016 9:36 PM

Trump: John Locher/AP; Documents: The New York Times

The New York Times dropped a bombshell of an investigation Saturday night when it published fragments from Donald Trump's 1995 tax return.

Tax experts hired by the Times said that the $916 million dollars in operating losses listed by Trump in the 1995 document may have allowed him to avoid paying federal taxes over a possible 18-year period.

A lawyer for Donald Trump threatened the Times with "prompt initiation of appropriate legal action," declaring the publication of the GOP nominee's records illegal. Trump's campaign itself responded to the report by issuing a statement that read, in part:

"Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes."

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Matt Viser
✔@mviser

Trump campaign statement contains a lot of words. None of them dispute anything in the NYT story.
7:23 PM - 1 Oct 2016

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More detail here:

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of "The Apprentice," or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump's casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.
"He has a vast benefit from his destruction" in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University's Schack Institute of Real Estate. Mr. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Mr. Trump's: "Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?"

The Times says the documents were mailed to one of its reporters. The envelope's return address, according to the Times, claimed it was sent from Trump Tower. Each of the pages sent to the newspaper listed the names and social security numbers for Trump and his then-partner, Marla Maples. The Times then verified the documents with Jack Mitnick, who handled Trump's tax returns at the time.

Trump has continually refused to release his tax returns, and the issue came up again during last Monday's presidential debate. Trump regularly defends himself by saying that an IRS audit prevents him from releasing the records. (The IRS says Trump is free to make his documents public.)

Read the full report and see the original documents over at The New York Times.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...new-york-times

Bombshell New York Times Report Reveals Details From Donald Trump's 1995 Tax Records

Trump could have avoided paying federal income taxes for nearly two decades.

KANYAKRIT VONGKIATKAJORN AND JAMES WEST
OCT. 1, 2016 9:36 PM

Trump: John Locher/AP; Documents: The New York Times

The New York Times dropped a bombshell of an investigation Saturday night when it published fragments from Donald Trump's 1995 tax return.

Tax experts hired by the Times said that the $916 million dollars in operating losses listed by Trump in the 1995 document may have allowed him to avoid paying federal taxes over a possible 18-year period.

A lawyer for Donald Trump threatened the Times with "prompt initiation of appropriate legal action," declaring the publication of the GOP nominee's records illegal. Trump's campaign itself responded to the report by issuing a statement that read, in part:

"Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes."

View image on Twitter

Follow
Matt Viser
✔@mviser

Trump campaign statement contains a lot of words. None of them dispute anything in the NYT story.
7:23 PM - 1 Oct 2016

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More detail here:

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of "The Apprentice," or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump's casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.
"He has a vast benefit from his destruction" in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University's Schack Institute of Real Estate. Mr. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Mr. Trump's: "Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?"

The Times says the documents were mailed to one of its reporters. The envelope's return address, according to the Times, claimed it was sent from Trump Tower. Each of the pages sent to the newspaper listed the names and social security numbers for Trump and his then-partner, Marla Maples. The Times then verified the documents with Jack Mitnick, who handled Trump's tax returns at the time.

Trump has continually refused to release his tax returns, and the issue came up again during last Monday's presidential debate. Trump regularly defends himself by saying that an IRS audit prevents him from releasing the records. (The IRS says Trump is free to make his documents public.)

Read the full report and see the original documents over at The New York Times.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...new-york-times

Dear John Doe the "Bombshell" New York Times article on Trump is more like a firecracker. Big deal. Trump choose to not pay more taxes than necessary. Gee and we all know that everybody else on planet earth is fighting to pay more taxes than they have to--yah right.
'

Originally Posted by 17patri76

Dear John Doe the "Bombshell" New York Times article on Trump is more like a firecracker. Big deal. Trump choose to not pay more taxes than necessary. Gee and we all know that everybody else on planet earth is fighting to pay more taxes than they have to--yah right.
'

I didn't write the headline. The newspaper did.

Bombshell report on Trump taxes sends GOP nominee reeling

It puts an exclamation point on what was already one of the worst weeks for any presidential candidate in recent memory.

By ELI STOKOLS
10/01/16 10:48 PM EDT
Updated 10/01/16 11:58 PM EDT


Donald Trump reported a nearly $1 billion loss on his 1995 tax returns, which were obtained by the New York Times. | Getty


It took less than a day for October to produce an "October surprise."

Donald Trump reported a nearly $1 billion loss on his 1995 tax returns and could therefore have avoided paying federal income taxes for almost two decades, the New York Times reported on Saturday, putting another unexpected exclamation point on what had already been one of the worst weeks for any presidential nominee in recent memory.


The Times, which hired tax experts to analyze the records, determined that “tax rules that are especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period” -- more than $50 million a year.

Times reporter Susanne Craig received the documents, which the paper describes as “three pages from what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns,” in the mail from an unknown source. The documents were sent last month and postmarked New York City, with a return address of Trump Tower -- the real estate mogul’s headquarters.

A statement from Trump’s campaign neither confirmed nor denied that he filed a $916 million loss in his 1995 tax returns, but charged that the documents were “illegally obtained” in what it said was “a further demonstration that the New York Times, like establishment media in general, is an extension of the Clinton Campaign, the Democratic Party and their global special interests.”

“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the statement, which was not attributed to Trump or any staffer by name, continued. “That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes. Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”

Trump’s refusal to release any tax returns, something every presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1972 has done, has been one of the larger clouds hanging over his campaign and one his Democratic opponent has sought to exploit.

It now appears as though the GOP nominee’s failure to come clean has backfired, with the Times drawing one of the same conclusions that Hillary Clinton offered as a possible explanation for Trump’s secrecy in last Monday’s debate — that he has paid little or no federal income tax for some time.

The story, which posted Saturday night just as Trump had taken the stage for a rally in Manheim, Pa., seemed to send the candidate, already reeling from a week that started with a bad debate and continued with a stream of recriminations over his treatment of a former Miss Universe in a 3 a.m. tweetstorm, spiraling at even greater velocity into a political abyss.

After taking the stage 102 minutes after the rally’s scheduled 7 p.m. start time, Trump veered off-script several times, impersonating Clinton’s near fall last month as she was suffering from pneumonia and asserting — after taking credit all week for his restraint in not bringing up Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties at the debate — that she probably isn’t faithful to her husband anymore because, he said, “Why should she be?”

Trump’s allies, meanwhile, tried to shrug the story off by minimizing the importance of a partial tax return from a single year and characterizing it as just the latest attempt by a liberal media to hurt their candidate.

“The campaign sees this as another contrived story,” said a Republican operative who works with the Trump campaign. “More media carrying the Clintons' water. If people don't like him doing that then they should change the tax laws."

While Trump is unlikely to lose many of his most ardent supporters, polls showed last Monday’s debate cost him dearly. GOP strategists, who had been buoyed by a narrowing of the race in September, have grown increasingly forlorn in the days following the debate, as Trump’s subsequent behavior seemed to underscore Clinton’s charge that he lacks the temperament to be commander in chief. They fear Saturday night’s surprise bombshell might lead voters to question another pillar of his candidacy — his claim to be a successful businessman and an anti-politician who, unlike the insiders he maligns in Washington, tells the truth.

“The confusion over the deductibility of losses over time is more than the average voter cares about. But the continuing debate over his taxes keeps him hoisted up on the petard of transparency,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist in Washington. “It is not fatal. But the Trump campaign has to find a way to drive a narrative of some substance against Clinton or his long term prospects are grim.”

Even that is unlikely, according to former Democratic National Committee official Mo Elleithee, who said the tax story was a “devastating body blow” that would “haunt him for the next five weeks.”

“The fundamental argument of his campaign,” Elleithee said, “is the little guy is getting screwed and I’m the guy who’s going to look after you. It is hard to make that argument when there is evidence now in front of everybody about how he has benefited personally, how he has gamed the system.”

Democrats have seized on the Times story, with the DNC blasting it out to its email list and officials from coast to coast tripping over themselves to provide comment.

Rick Palacio, the Democratic Party chairman of Colorado, where Clinton’s lead had shrunk in recent weeks, called the story “mind-boggling."

“I don’t think that in itself it’s going to make a huge difference, but compound it with really the terrible week he’s had with Machado and the debate last week, all this is weighing him down to the point where he has nothing left to do but explain his past to the American people,” Palacio said.

For now, Trump is threatening what would likely be a protracted legal battle with the world’s most influential newspaper. A lawyer for Trump sent a letter to the Times describing the publication of the documents as illegal and threatening “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action,” according to the paper.

But the Times appears ready to do battle: CNN reported on Sept. 12 that Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, told a Harvard University forum that he would risk prison, if necessary, to publish Trump’s tax returns.

Asked why by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, Baquet said the unauthorized publication of Trump’s tax records is in the public interest because he is "a presidential candidate whose whole campaign is built on his success as a businessman, and his wealth.”

Clinton’s Twitter account — managed by her staff — immediately retweeted the story twice, and many of her aides weighed in on Twitter within minutes.

"BOMBSHELL: Trump's returns show just how lousy a businessman he is AND how long he may have avoided paying any taxes," wrote press secretary Brian Fallon.

Campaign Manager Robby Mook said in a statement that the story “reveals the colossal nature of Donald Trump's past business failures and just how long he may have avoided paying any federal income taxes whatsoever.”

Mook added: “He apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades -- while tens of millions of working families paid theirs. He calls that 'smart.' Now that the gig is up, why doesn't he go ahead and release his returns to show us all how 'smart' he really is?"

POLITICO reported in June that in 1991 and 1993, Trump appeared to have paid “zero, or near-zero” in personal income taxes, citing records from New Jersey’s gambling authorities.

Asked at the time whether he had paid personal income taxes during those years, Trump responded simply, “Welcome to the real estate business.”

During Monday’s presidential debate, Clinton attacked Trump for refusing to release his tax returns, which he said he will not disclose until an IRS audit of them is complete.

Clinton floated several alternate theories as to why Trump was refusing to release the documents, including, she said, because “maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes.”

“The only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax,” Clinton said.

“That makes me smart,” Trump retorted.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/1...#ixzz4LtlbGFoP

But the Times appears ready to do battle: CNN reported on Sept. 12 that Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, told a Harvard University forum that he would risk prison, if necessary, to publish Trump’s tax returns.

Asked why by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, Baquet said the unauthorized publication of Trump’s tax records is in the public interest because he is "a presidential candidate whose whole campaign is built on his success as a businessman, and his wealth.”

It's really not his wealth, Baquet. It's certainly not his income and it's definitely not how much or how little income tax he paid. Most Republicans oppose the income tax and have since 1913 when Democrats passed the first income tax.

What Trump's campaign is built on is his success as a businessman in achieving things, getting results, building, turning bad areas into a places of employment and beauty. His campaign is also built on his political philosophy of secure borders and protected trade. Those are the 3 reasons Trump won the Republican nomination, those are the 3 reasons he's within reach of the Presidency.