Pelosi predicts Democrats will get Trump tax returns if Biden wins

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday predicted that if Joe Biden is elected president, his administration would provide House Democrats with President Trump’s tax returns.

“When we win this election, and we have a new president of the United States in January, and we have a new secretary of the Treasury, and [Ways and Means Committee Chairman] Richie Neal asks for the president’s returns, then the world will see what the president has been hiding all of this time,” Pelosi said during a press conference. 

Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, requested Trump’s federal tax returns from the IRS in April 2019, citing a provision of the tax code that states that the Treasury secretary “shall furnish” tax returns requested by the chairs of Congress’s tax committees. The Trump administration rejected Neal’s request, prompting Neal to file a lawsuit that has yet to be resolved.

If the Ways and Means Committee were to receive Trump’s tax returns, it could review them in a closed session and then vote to submit a report to the full House that could make part or all of the documents public.

Neal is being challenged in a Sept. 1 primary by Holyoke, Mass., Mayor Alex Morse, who has the backing of a number of progressive organizations. Progressives have criticized Neal for not requesting Trump’s federal tax returns sooner and for not using a New York law that allows him to request Trump’s state tax returns.

Pelosi defended Neal’s handling of the efforts to pursue Trump’s tax returns, saying the committee chairman “has been completely strong and tough-minded on this.”

“We are at the mercy of the courts,” Pelosi said. “But he has been very strong in how he has gone forward. He could not do anything more.”

Pelosi also touted Neal more broadly, referencing his work on the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that went into effect earlier this year and his work on House bills to incentivize renewable energy through the tax code and to ease the financial burden for child care during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I couldn’t be prouder than to speak in terms of the things that he has specifically done that I have seen on a day-to-day basis to get things done,” she said. 

“It would be a tremendous loss to that district to lose the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee,” she said. “And may I say as an aside if you promise not to tell anybody, every time I turn around with any bill that we’re doing, there’s some project of national significance in his district that seems to have made the cut. He’s proud of his district, he’s proud of its ingenuity and he makes sure that it is recognized in legislation in the Congress.”