Tax Report Article Unlikely to Be "Fake News"

Misbar’s investigation found that the claim of the article being “fake news” is at the very least suspicious. The New York Times reported that they legally obtained Trump’s tax information for the past two decades and that a team of reporters and financial experts examined the records to ensure that they could accurately describe the information within. The report says that Trump “had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.” This is despite ostensibly receiving $427.4 million through 2018 from various business ventures.

Further, the NYT says they discovered that in 2016 and 2017, Trump paid $750 in taxes to the U.S. government.

The Trump Organization’s lawyer, Alan Garten, disagreed. He said: “Over the past decade, President Trump 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.” However, personal taxes are different from business taxes. While they do not include Trump’s personal taxes, the records examined by the NYT allegedly entail all of his business organization tax information.

Following a report that President Richard Nixon only paid $1,670.84 in taxes in 1970 and 1971, every U.S. President has made their tax returns public. Every one, that is, except for Trump.

Trump claims that he has not released his taxes because he is currently being audited by the IRS. However, IRS officials say that it is acceptable to release your returns even while being audited. Prior IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said: “From our standpoint, if you’re being audited, and you want to do something else, share that information with your returns, you can do that.”

Even right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart, Fox News, and One America News Network, which usually support Trump, have published about the article’s findings without calling it fake news. 

As Misbar’s team is unable to review the tax records ourselves, we cannot say with total certainty that the NYT article is completely accurate. However, given the extensive work that went into it, its content being reported on news sites across the political spectrum, and Trump’s refusal to release his taxes despite approval from the IRS to do so, we rate the claim that the article is “fake news” as suspicious.