Even as a 2016 presidential candidate, Donald Trump resisted releasing his tax returns. Now, however, they have finally been released, and for MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, this is proof that the former president has always lied about his tax returns.

Trump pulled out all the stops to prevent the release of his returns during the 2016 election and kept it up throughout his presidency, claiming they were under audit, but the House Ways and Means Committee eventually concluded the IRS failed to audit taxes, Raw Story reports. Such an audit is required as part of a mandatory presidential program but during the first two years of his term, the agency never completed this.

CORRECTION: We detailed how the IRS did not audit Trump’s tax returns through the mandatory presidential audit. However, we failed to mention that Trump was under PERSONAL audit for many years, as detailed by The New York Times. We apologize for the error and promise to do better in the future.

“It proves that Hillary Clinton was right all along,” Brzezinski said. “Nancy Pelosi was right all along. Chuck Schumer was right all along. The Democrats were right all along. 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 noted. “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 that 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.”

But now the table is definitely turning. In 2018 Trump installed a “loyalist” (per Raw Story) IRS commissioner who’d previously defended (in public) Trump’s refusal to make his tax returns public, and it’s this official who will probably be called to testify before the U.S. Senate, especially since Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) has called for legislation to strengthen mandatory audits for presidents.

“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,” Mika said. “It doesn’t matter, but he was — it does prove he was lying from the get-go. Will it move the meter?”

Let’s hope it does.

President Richard M. Nixon was the first president to release his tax returns, and as is the case with Trump, this is because there were questions about deductions he had taken to reduce his tax liability.

Per Investopedia:

“Media reports suggested that Nixon paid only $792 in federal income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971, even though he earned more than $200,000 in each of those years. To allay public concerns, Nixon subsequently released his tax returns for every year between 1969, when he entered office, and 1972. The incident led to his infamous remark to the press pool: ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

I think we can see how this relates to Donald Trump, can’t we?

Here’s what Brzezinski had to say below.