For years, Donald Trump used every lie in his repertoire to avoid the release of his tax returns. In 2011, Trump said would release his tax returns when President Barack Obama produces a birth certificate. Days later, Obama released his original long-form birth certificate. But Trump did not release his tax records.
During the 2016 campaign –and throughout his presidency– Trump claimed the returns couldn’t be released because they were under audit. Not surprisingly, he lied.
The House Ways and Means Committee revealed this week that the IRS failed to audit Trump’s taxes, as required under a mandatory presidential program, for the first two years of his term and did not complete any of them.
The revelation was the main subject of discussion during Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” where co-host Mika Brzezinski said Democrats were right about Trump all along.
“It proves that Hillary Clinton was right all along, Nancy Pelosi was right all along, Chuck Schumer was right all along,” Brzezinski said. “The Democrats were right all along.”
She added: “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 continued. “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.”
“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 from MSNBC.
