Richard Nixon's misconduct led to the IRS rules that helped Congress just get Trump's tax returns
On Tuesday's edition of MSNBC's "The Beat," New York Times investigative journalist Suzanne Craig — who previously obtained a few years of former President Donald Trump's tax returns — explained how the House Ways and Means Committee finally came to be in possession of more up-to-date returns, following the Supreme Court's final refusal to block the transmission of the documents.
The legal basis for House investigators' request, explained Craig, comes back to the abuses of former President Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
"What will the Ways and Means Committee end up seeing when it finally receives Trump's tax returns?" said anchor Katie Phang.
"In addition to getting the 1995 tax return, we also got decades of his corporate and personal tax returns," said Craig. "The first thing they're going to see, he's a pretty bad businessman. I'm not sure that's what they're looking for. You know, this story has its roots in Richard Nixon. It goes back to those days when there were procedures that were put into the IRS that required that the president be audited every year, and that was just because Richard Nixon had some personal tax shenanigans going on and they just wanted to make sure — they wanted to have a way to review it."
Essentially, said Craig, House investigators are just saying that "we want to look at that audit procedure, we want to see how it's done."
"Is it rigorous?" continued Craig. "It's in the IRS manual, but they want to have more oversight, more understanding of it. Just because of everything we have been through with Donald Trump's taxes and the complexity of them, they want to see if there should be changes made to the way tax returns are handled of a president. Should there be more disclosure? This has been going on forever. Since back in the Stone Age, is the way the news works these days."
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