President Donald Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway claimed Monday that Trump was still under audit from the IRS and would not release his tax returns until the audit was finished.
Conway claimed there was an ongoing audit via her Twitter account:
On taxes, answers (& repeated questions) are same from campaign: POTUS is under audit and will not release until that is completed. #nonews
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) January 23, 2017
That justification is a shift from Conway’s response to the tax question on Sunday.
“The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns,” she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care.”
In fact, hundreds of thousands of people have signed a White House petition calling on Trump to release his taxes, and a recent Pew Research survey found a large majority of Americans agree that he should release them.
Trump has never produced any proof that he is under audit from the IRS, although he did release a letter from his lawyers which said as much. He acknowledged in September that he could still release his returns even while under audit, but that he refused to do so. Nothing legally prevents Trump from releasing the returns, even if he is under audit.
Lawyers representing Trump wrote last year that he had been under “continuous examination” since 2002 by the IRS.
WikiLeaks’ Twitter account on Sunday also appealed to readers to send in Trump’s tax returns:
Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway stated today that Trump will not release his tax returns. Send them to: https://t.co/cLRcuIiQXz so we can.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 22, 2017
Trump’s breach of promise over the release of his tax returns is even more gratuitous than Clinton concealing her Goldman Sachs transcripts.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 22, 2017
