(Headline USA) President Donald Trump allegedly paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president and in his first year in the White House, according to an anonymously sourced report Sunday in the New York Times, which refused to disclose how it came across or obtained the information.
The report says that Trump, who has fiercely guarded his tax filings and is the only president in modern times not to make them public, paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years.
The president’s financial disclosures indicated he earned at least $434.9 million in 2018, but the tax filings reported a $47.4 million loss.
Roughly half of Americans pay no income taxes, primarily because of how low their incomes are. But IRS figures indicate that the average tax filer paid roughly $12,200 in 2017, about 16 times more than what the report said the president paid.
The Times said the disclosure comes from tax return data it obtained extending over two decades.
Speaking at a news conference Sunday at the White House, Trump dismissed the report as “fake news” and maintained he has paid taxes, though he gave no specifics.
He also vowed that information about his taxes “will all be revealed,” but he offered no timeline for the disclosure and made similar promises during the 2016 campaign on which he never followed through.
A lawyer for the Trump Organization, Alan Garten, and a spokesperson for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press on the report.
Garten told the Times that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate.”
He said in a statement to the news organization that the president “has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015.”
A serial purveyor of anonymously-sourced reports on Trump during his administration — many of which were unproven or turned out not to be true — the Times said it declined to provide Garten with the tax filings in order to protect its sources, but it said its sources had legal access to the records.
The president has fielded court challenges against those seeking access to his returns, including the U.S. House, which is suing to get Trump’s tax returns as part of congressional oversight that does not suggest any crime has been committed.
During his first two years as president, Trump allegedly received $73 million from foreign operations, which in addition to his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland included $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey, among other nations.
The report said the president in 2017 paid $145,400 in taxes in India and $156,824 in the Philippines, compared to just $750 in U.S. income taxes. The Times said the tax records did not reveal any unreported connections to Russia.
Trump, starting in 2010, claimed and received an income tax refund that totaled $72.9 million, which the Times said was at the core of an ongoing audit by the IRS.
The Times said a ruling against Trump could cost him $100 million or more.
The president could also face mounting financial pressure in the years ahead. The tax records show he’s carrying a total of $421 million in loans and debt that are primarily due within four years.
Most of that debt comes from the Doral golf resort in Florida ($125 million) and Trump’s Washington hotel ($160 million), two properties that the Times said are struggling financially.
During his first general election debate against Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Clinton said that perhaps Trump wasn’t releasing his tax returns because he had paid nothing in federal taxes.
Trump interrupted her to say, “That makes me smart.”
The Times has spent little time and effort examining the questionable deals of his opponent for the presidency, Democrat Joe Biden, and his son Hunter, who reaped millions of dollars from relationships with companies and individuals in Russia, Ukraine, and China.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
