As expected, the House Ways and Means Committee Democrats used their final days in the majority to release six years of tax returns connected to former president Donald Trump. This is an unprecedented action, one that was condemned by committee Republicans, and rightly so –this is banana-republic stuff. Committee chairman Richard Neal (D., Mass.) sounded a note of reluctance in his statement, putting most of the blame on the IRS for not auditing Trump enough while he was president. Leaking a tax return is a felony; regardless of the procedural hoops Democrats jumped through to get these returns out there, they’re now as public as they would have been if they’d been leaked, and the committee effectively forcing the leak creates a very bad precedent (can we see Hunter Biden’s tax returns next?).
