Donald Trump
Donald TrumpReuters

A House committee voted on Tuesday to release former President Donald Trump’s tax information to the public, capping a three-year legal saga initiated by Democrats to obtain and release his closely held financial documents, Bloomberg reported.

Tuesday’s action by the Ways and Means Committee — over the objections of the panel’s Republicans — comes in the waning days of the House Democratic majority and one day after Trump was referred for criminal prosecution by the House panel investigating the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.

The panel, which has an eight-seat Democratic majority, agreed on a party-line vote to release information from Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2015 to 2020.

Democrats first requested the documents in 2019 to help aid an investigation into the annual audit of presidents. After a lengthy court battle, the Ways and Means Committee obtained the financial filings late last month.

It was not clear Tuesday when the full set of documents would be available.

Though candidates for the US presidency aren’t required by law to show voters their tax returns, they have done so for decades as a gesture of transparency.

Trump, however, said that at the advice of his lawyers, he wouldn’t release his tax documents while he’s under audit by the Internal Revenue Service. He has said he has been audited constantly since 2004. There is no law that prevents tax returns under audit from being made public.

Trump has also said there’s “nothing to learn from” his returns, that they are “extremely complex” so people “wouldn’t understand them,” and that Americans who aren’t reporters don’t “care at all” about what’s in them.

Trump had promised during the 2016 presidential campaign to release his returns after the conclusion of a routine audit, but had not done so.

Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic rival in that election, repeatedly criticized Trump during the campaign for his refusal to release his tax returns, breaking with decades of tradition, and urged him to do so.

In 2020, weeks ahead of the election, The New York Times published excerpts of Trump’s tax returns that showed he paid minimal taxes, including paying no income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years because of large losses that offset any profits.

In 2016, The New York Timesobtained snippets of Trump’s returns from the 1990s, hinting he might have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades.