Donald Trump confirmed in response to a question during the 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden that he closed his bank account in China before his first campaign. But six years of Trump’s tax records released Friday reveal that’s not true.
“I had an open account, and I closed it,” Trump angrily told moderator Kristen Welker, NBC’s White House correspondent, at the campaign’s final debate in October of that year. “I closed it before I was president, let alone president.”
Representative-elect Daniel Goldman (DNY), who was the lead counsel for Democrats in the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, noted that the former president owned a bank. account in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to tax records.
“In general, you only have a bank account in a foreign country if you do transactions in that country’s currency. What business did Trump do in China when he was President? he asked in a tweet.
Trump, who has accounts in several countries and also collected income from more than a dozen foreign countries while in office, paid more taxes in 2020 to the Chinese government than America’s federal income tax that year, he returned.
Trump also lied a month earlier to Fox News commentator Chris Wallace, who pointedly asked him during the first presidential debate in 2020 if he had only paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, as reported by The New York Times (which Trump has reported . immediately blasted as “fake news”).
Trump angrily responded – twice – that he had paid “millions of dollars.” His return stated that he had paid only $750 in federal income tax in each of those years. Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income tax in 2020, the last year he took office, according to tax records.
In addition, Trump does not annually donate his $400,000 presidential salary to charity, as he claims. He declared no charitable contributions whatsoever on his return in 2020.
Among the early revelations that emerged in Trump’s tax records, some of the most disturbing were his overseas financial problems during his presidency,
“highlighting a string of potential conflicts of interest,” noted Politico.
Trump has several bank accounts in several foreign countries, and collected millions of dollars in income from more than a dozen countries, including Panama, the Philippines – which dictator President Rodrigo Duterte praised – and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.
While the president routinely places assets in blind trusts while in office, Trump’s eldest son continues to run the Trump Organization and make deals around the world with countries affected by the Trump administration’s policies and spending.
Trump’s response pointed to his extensive financial losses in the two years prior to his presidency, some of which he incurred to reduce his tax bill.
He earned $15.8 million in gross income during his first three years in office. Trump paid $642,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $750 in 2016 and in 2017, just under $1 million in 2018, $133,000 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.