On September 23, 2016, a New York Times reporter checked her mailbox and found an envelope with several pages from President Donald Trump's 1995 tax returns.
It took more than two years, but the Times finally unraveled some of the mysteries revealed in those tax returns through a 14,000-word investigative report that documented how the Trumps engaged in massive tax fraud, how Donald's father Fred Trump steered untaxed gifts to his son and how Donald tried to scam his father into signing away his empire through an addendum to his will.
On Wednesday, NYT reporter David Barstow went on Fox News to talk with anchor Shep Smith about his team's report.
"There's a lot that we don't know about President Trump—then candidate Donald Trump—and his history with money," he said of the September 2016 discovery of the documents. "Let's try to pull back as many layers of this onion as we can."
The Times did not get around to peeling that onion until after the election
"What we were seeing is that Fred Trump through, you know, starting when Donald Trump was three years old and moving forward had been endlessly creative in coming up with new ways to get money into Donald Trump's pocket," he said. "He didn't pay him to be like on his payroll, but he paid him to be his purchasing agent, he paid him to be his property manager, he paid him to be a consultant. He gave him the laundry revenue from the buildings."
And yet it was never enough for Donald, who tried to scam his own father with an addendum to his will at the moment when Donald's casino projects were failing.
"Even after this incredible generosity from Fred Trump to Donald Trump, there comes this moment that we discover in our reporting that there was one line that was sort of too far even for Fred Trump," he said. "It was when Fred Trump discovered that Donald Trump had hired lawyers to rewrite a portion of his will in a way that Fred Trump perceived could put his entire empire at risk. It would have given Donald Trump so much control over the empire that Fred Trump believed it would have allowed him to use everything that he had built for 70 years to bail out Trump's own failing businesses."
Smith pushed back on the president and his fellow Fox News hosts who have been calling the report "boring" all day.
"The president says this is an old tired boring story. His lawyers say there's nothing to it. It's a hit piece by the 'Failing' New York Times," Smith said.
"You can search every story ever written about Donald Trump and every book written about Donald Trump and every TV interview done by Donald Trump. You'll never see any mention anywhere" of the ways the Trumps used shell companies to avoid paying taxes, said Barstow. "This is a very new story."
Watch the interview below.
