The White House on Tuesday blasted The New York Times for publishing a story saying President Trump used “dubious” tax schemes during the 1990s to gain millions of dollars from his father’s real estate empire.
In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the bombshell report as a “misleading attack” on the Trump family but stopped short of denying its claims.
“Fred Trump has been gone for nearly twenty years and it’s sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times,” the statement reads, referring to the president’s father. “Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions.”{mosads}
While the statement was issued under Sanders’s name, it included a litany of Trump-style attacks on the Times and other media outlets. It asserted that the media’s “credibility with the American people is at an all time low because they are consumed with attacking the president and his family 24/7 instead of reporting the news.”
The statement also repeated a claim Trump has made, without evidence, that the Times apologized to the president for its coverage of the 2016 election.
“Perhaps another apology from the New York Times, like the one they had to issue after they got the 2016 election so embarrassingly wrong, is in order,” the White House said.
The Times’s report detailed a litany of suspicious tax practices used by Trump and his family members, including that they established a “sham” corporation to disguise taxable gifts from their parents and undervalued many of Fred Trump’s properties to avoid tax payments.
Trump’s parents left their children more than $1 billion, which would have resulted in a roughly $550 million tax bill at the time, according to the Times. However, the Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million on that source of income. Tax experts said some of the practices may have broken the law.
Charles Harder, an attorney for Trump, said in a statement to the Times that allegations of tax evasion are “100 percent false.” He said Trump “had virtually no involvement” with the tax strategies used by his family, which he said were carried out by professional tax advisers.
Trump did not comment to the Times for the story.