Reuters - Donald Trump's
decision to take a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax return showed his
business acumen and "genius" at figuring out how to minimize his
tax
bill, two of the Republican presidential candidate's advisers said on Sunday.
"This is
a perfectly legal application of the tax code. And he would have been fool not
to take advantage of it," said Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor
who is one of Trump's advisers.
Speaking on
the ABC program "This Week," Giuliani said that as a business owner,
Trump has a "fiduciary duty" to the investors in his real estate
company to maximize profits.
Giuliani
compared Trump's ability to come back from the nearly $1-billion loss to
turnarounds made by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Winston Churchill, the former
British prime minister who led the United Kingdom through World War Two.
"It shows
what a genius he is. It shows he was able to preserve his enterprise, and then
he was able to build it," Giuliani said on CNN's "State of the
Union."
The New York
Times reported on Saturday that it had obtained Trump's 1995 tax records and it
quoted experts as saying that the $916 million loss he reported for that year
may have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
Susanne Craig,
one of the Times reporters who was bylined on the story about Trump's tax
records, said the tax documents arrived in a manila envelope in her mailbox at
the Times with a return address of the Trump Organization.
She said a
lawyer for Trump had threatened the newspaper with legal action if it decided
to publish the documents.
The tax
benefits outlined in the documents stemmed from financial deals Trump made that
went bad in the early 1990s.
The Trump
campaign, in a statement on Saturday, said the tax document was obtained
illegally and accused the New York Times of operating as an extension of the
presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, Trump's rival in the Nov. 8 election.
"I know
our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am
the only one who can fix them. #failing@nytimes," Trump wrote on Twitter
on Sunday.
Chris
Christie, the New Jersey governor and head of Trump's presidential transition
team, said that Trump's records showed that the U.S. tax code was an
"absolute mess" and that Trump was the best person to fix it.
"There's
no one who has shown more genius in their way to maneuver about the tax code as
he rightfully used the laws to do that," Christie said on "Fox News
Sunday."
But Clinton
spokesman Brian Fallon said the tax writeoff "shows the colossal scale of
his business failures" and that the wealthy real estate developer operates
under a different set of rules than ordinary taxpayers.
Clinton has
repeatedly called on Trump to release his tax returns, as is standard procedure
for modern presidential candidates.
Trump has
declined to release his tax records, saying he will not do so until an audit of
his returns by the Internal Revenue Service is complete.
The IRS has
said that an audit does not bar an individual from sharing their own tax
information.
Reuters
Follow Solenzo Blog on
0 Comments