Donald Trump denied the bombshell report from The New York Times claiming that he hasn’t paid taxes in 10 out of 15 years and only paid $750 in 2016 and again in 2017, as Fox News reported Sunday.
Trump held a press conference less than an hour after the article was published, during which he completely denied that any part of the revelation was accurate.
“It’s fake news, it’s totally made up,” Trump said. “Everything was wrong, they are so bad.”
Trump is the first president in modern time to decline to release his tax records and has fought in court to maintain the privacy of his financial information. Previously, he has said that he is unable to release any information because he is currently under audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
“I’m under audit,” Trump said. “They’re doing an assessment.”
However, it’s not clear why being under audit would preclude one from releasing their information if they chose to.
While he has repeatedly said he has a net worth of billions of dollars, the report contracted Trump’s claims, showing him to be millions in debt. The tax records show him losing more than he made for many of the years he filed.
While stating the entire article was false, Trump also mentioned that taxes were paid.
“I’ve paid a lot and I’ve paid a lot state income taxes too,” he said.
A lawyer for Trump’s business, Alan Garten, also called the report false. He asserted that the president had paid millions of personal taxes since 2015 alone.
“ The New York Times’ story is riddled with gross inaccuracies. Over the past decade the President has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government,” Garten said. “While we tried to explain this to the Times , they refused to listen and rejected our repeated request that they show us any of the documentation they purport to be relying on to substantiate their claims.”
He added that the story was an attempt to harm Trump’s reputation leading up to the election. With the first debate slated to happen on Tuesday, many voters are focused on the two candidates.
As The Inquisitr previously reported, the story also claimed that Trump may have avoided paying taxes on funds that he sent to his daughter Ivanka. It claimed that he sent her over $740,000 in fees for being a consultant on several of the family’s projects, which she also oversaw as part of the family business.