Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal reported that while President Trump has earned $7 billion in income from his companies since entering the White House, he has not reported any of that income to the federal government, which is required to do so with reports of even the largest transactions.
Mark Corallo, the deputy general counsel of Trump’s personal lawyers who helped negotiate the deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, told the Journal that Trump only lists some of his income in public filings, which average about 300 pages long.
“This is the way the law works. The vast majority of the President’s businesses earn their money with business transactions or other types of transactions that do not require a report to the U.S. Treasury,” Corallo said.
Corallo is a legal analyst for Fox News, and Richard Ben-Veniste, a former lead prosecutor on the Watergate inquiry who has also been a long-time commentator for CNN, blasted Corallo’s statement on his twitter account.
“Like his client, Trump’s decision to systematically avoid reporting this valuable income is largely a dud,” Ben-Veniste tweeted. “The President has been constantly reported to the IRS. He has asked for private tax returns. He has been sued for self-dealing of owned properties. He has been repeatedly sued for failure to disclose his net worth. Where’s the note on ‘Love thy neighbor, sir’ … after all, that was the top policy plank in the Republican party platform during the 2016 campaign.”
On “Justice” last night, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said that Trump was obligated to disclose his income to Congress when he was first elected, and that now that he’s held the job for nearly two years he should be required to report it. “What you are talking about here is the obligation to declare his foreign and domestic business,” Sekulow said. “It is a source of all kinds of income for the United States. There are no controls. There are no audits. It is large amounts of money.”
Watch the full discussion in the video above.
To respond to NewsHour Weekend’s coverage of President Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns, contact the NewsHour office on [email protected] or the Washington Bureau here.