WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump's business losses in 1995 were so large that they could have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years, according to records obtained by The New York Times.
In a story published online late Saturday, the Times said it anonymously received the first pages of Trump's 1995 state income tax filings in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The filings show a net loss of $915,729,293 in federal taxable income for the year.
That Trump was losing money during the early to mid-1990s — a period marked by bankruptcies and poor business decisions — was already well established. But the records obtained by the Times show losses of such a magnitude that they potentially allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes for years, possibly until the end of the last decade.
"I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them," Trump tweeted on Sunday.
His campaign accused the newspaper of working to benefit the Republican nominee's presidential rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, and said that Trump had paid "hundreds of millions" of dollars in other kinds of taxes over the years.
Trump's allies defended him during appearances on the Sunday news shows.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Trump "had some failures and then he built an empire" and called the businessman "a genius at how to take advantage of legal remedies that can help your company survive and grow."
Rudy Giuliani
"Don't you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she's ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails," Giuliani told ABC's "This Week."
In a separate interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Giuliani noted that "poor" people take advantage of similar "loopholes," referring to the millions of Americans who aren't required to pay federal income taxes each year because their incomes are too low.
Clinton's primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who made wealth inequality a top campaign issue, said that assuming Trump's tax strategy was legal, "what it tells you is you have a corrupt tax system which says to ordinary people, you're supposed to pay your taxes. But if you're a billionaire, there are all kinds of loopholes that you can utilize that enable you ... not to pay anything in taxes."
Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, used the Times story to needle Trump about not releasing his tax returns and contending during his first debate with Clinton that not paying federal income taxes would show he was "smart."
Mook said in a statement Saturday that Trump apparently avoided paying taxes for two decades "while tens of millions of working families paid theirs. He calls that 'smart.'" Mook added: "Now that the gig is up, why doesn't he go ahead and release his returns to show us all how 'smart' he really is?"
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