Trump always had reasons to keep his taxes secret. They were “under audit,” but never got around to explaining that being under audit doesn’t impact whether one can release one’s returns, nor did the audit ever finish. Moreover, even the “under audit” excuse was suspicious because, at any given point in time, Trump may have 500 LLCs of various types within various companies. By the law of averages, one of them will be under audit at all times. Trump could stand at a podium and say “My taxes are under audit” and not mention that he wasn’t referencing his personal taxes, just his “taxes” if he was the only owner of the LLC.

But few people knew that Congress always had the power to subpoena Trump’s taxes and that Trump had to turn them over. New York took the issue to the Supreme Court, the feds never did. Until now. DOJ has directed the Treasury Department to forward Trump’s taxes to Congress and this is perfectly legal. According to PBS.Org

While tax law requires the IRS to keep the returns of individual Americans private, there are exceptions. Most are common sense, such as when people are under investigation for tax fraud, a state has a right to access returns.

The Senate Finance and the House Ways and Means Committees also have the right to request “any return or return information.” The only caveat is that if the request involves a specific identifiable individual, the committee must view the return privately.

In the past, Congress has sought individual returns. Most recently, in 2014, Republicans accessed the returns of more than a dozen tax-exempt organizations as part of an investigation of whether the IRS was discriminating against conservative groups. They even released the returns publicly, which many criticized as a violation of their privacy.

Well, that couldn’t matter less to Chuck Grassley, who smells a… well, an investigation into a possible crime? Or at the very least a possible conflict of interest between a president and his duties as president? Grassley apparently doesn’t care that Congress has oversight of the Executive Branch, nor does Grassley care that Congress can ask for the returns for the sole reason that they are investigating whether new legislation is needed to prevent certain situations from arising again.

Grassley clearly worries about what those taxes might show, nothing more:

Grassley on DOJ telling Treasury to turn over Trump tax returns to House Ways and Means: “It doesn’t matter who it is, such a partisan and targeted abuse of private taxpayer information is a very dangerous precedent that will damage our country.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 30, 2021

No, it does matter who it is. It is not “partisan,” nor is it a dangerous precedent. Nixon was required to turn his taxes over. Every other recent president has done it voluntarily, so how is this “dangerous precedent”?

It is not. It is simply pro-wrestling again, all fake, all meant to enrage the MAGA right and convince them that they are always the victims of the big bad Democrats.”
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