Democratic Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee said that the House Ways and Means Committee could use any information gleaned from President Donald Trump’s tax returns to “strengthen” tax law, in a Thursday interview on CNN’s “New Day.”
“We have a specific question we are trying to get at, a policy question. That is whether the IRS is auditing and enforcing the tax laws of the United States on the president of the United States. We don’t know, for example, whether or not the president’s returns are actually under audit,” Kildee began. (RELATED: House Democrats Have A Timetable For Demanding Trump’s Tax Returns)
“In order for us to determine whether there should be changes in law to strengthen that, we have to have a look at the returns and the associated documents,” he continued. “The only way we can get that, the only way we can determine that is to have the chairman have access to those individual returns and the eight business entities that we think constitute a full view of the president’s tax documents.”
Kildee sent a letter to Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service David J. Kautter asking for the president’s tax returns on his personal income, and on his businesses for a six-year period. The Democrat’s statement Wednesday didn’t mention potential changes in the tax code, instead opting to use language Democrats have used before referencing Trump’s businesses and looking for ways for the president to enrich himself once he leaves office.
“The President is the only person who can sign bills into law, and the public deserves to know whether the President’s personal financial interests affect his public decision making,” Kildee wrote Wednesday. “For instance, the President recently signed into law a massive tax cut for the biggest corporations, including real estate developers. Did the President stand to financially benefit from these changes to our tax law?”
Kildee told The Daily Beast that if his committee managed to obtain the returns from the IRS, those documents would not be officially released to the public, but would instead be used to “dive” into the document, and figure out what needs to change based on Trump’s behavior.