President Donald Trump isn’t the only one in his family that has massive issues with his taxes and has all the reasons in the world to hide them from the American people. It turns out, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner (Ivanka Trump’s husband) has not paid any federal income taxes for years, despite being a millionaire and benefiting greatly from Trump and the GOP’s tax cuts.
This information is making headlines thanks to a report by the New York Times, who reviewed confidential documents and discovered that Kushner was using a “common tax-minimizing maneuver” to avoid paying his taxes. The Times reported:
Thirteen tax accountants and lawyers, including J. Richard Harvey Jr., a tax official in the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations, reviewed the documents for The Times. Mr. Harvey said that, assuming the documents accurately reflect information from his tax returns, Mr. Kushner appeared to have paid little or no federal income taxes during at least five of the past eight years. The other experts agreed and said Mr. Kushner probably didn’t pay much in the three other years, either.”
The Times accompanied the report about how Kushner avoided paying taxes with an image of a document showing his net worth, which was shared by “a person who has had financial dealings with Mr. Kushner and his family.”
In response to the report, a spokesperson for Kushner’s lawyer has weighed in:
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he would not respond to assumptions derived from documents that provide an incomplete picture and were ‘obtained in violation of the law and standard business confidentiality agreements. However, always following the advice of numerous attorneys and accountants, Mr. Kushner properly filed and paid all taxes due under the law and regulations.’”
Mr. Mirijanian also tried to defend Kushner by saying he “has avoided work that would pose any conflict of interest.”
There is nothing Kushner or his team can say that will erase the disgust that America feels right now, knowing that Trump and the GOP have changed tax codes so that they can directly benefit from them — and they’ve taken all the tax breaks they can get, many of them refusing to pay taxes altogether. There is no end in sight for the lengths Republicans will go to keep themselves rich and in power, while making Americans suffer.
“The Trump administration was in a position to clean up the tax code,” said Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Instead, they doubled down on those provisions, particularly the ones they have familiarity with to benefit themselves.” https://t.co/cyNCNfT6mP
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 13, 2018
Exclusive: We obtained confidential documents showing Jared Kushner’s personal finances from 2009-2016. Despite earning millions of dollars, he appears to not have paid federal income taxes in most of those years. @JesseDrucker @FlitterOnFraud (1/5) https://t.co/8ybH9oasYJ
— David Enrich (@davidenrich) October 13, 2018
Wealthy folk like Jared Kushner get to take massive tax breaks. Everyone else actually pays taxes.
What did the #GOP tax law do? It gave Kushner even more tax breaks while raising taxes on the middle class by eliminating or capping deductions.#SaturdayMorning Thoughts https://t.co/JFfZSo69q9
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) October 13, 2018
Featured image via screen capture
