April 10, 2019 Which Democratic Presidential Candidates Have Released Their Tax Returns?

Ever since President Richard Nixon submitted to a public tax audit in 1973, every presidential candidate has offered some view into their tax records—every candidate, that is, except Donald Trump. The president has famously refused to participate in that precedent since he faced off against Hillary Clinton in 2016 (who, despite her reputation for secrecy, had made three decades’ worth of tax documents public). As the Trump administration continues to find itself mired in conflicts of interest, Trump’s opponents have demanded he share his returns. But the president has repeatedly claimed he can’t because he’s being audited by the IRS (a procedure that the agency performs on every president and vice president and that has never posed a barrier to past candidates). His attorneys have leaned on that defense even as House Democrats requested the president’s personal and business tax returns last week.

For Democrats running for president, releasing their tax history signals a regard for openness and accountability in a way that Trump’s obfuscation surely has not. And the current federal lawmakers have extra incentive for sharing their returns: All of them have co-sponsored their chambers’ respective versions of sweeping reform legislation that would require presidential candidates to share 10 years’ worth of personal and business returns.

And yet, despite these grand gestures in the spirit of transparency, many of the 2020 hopefuls have yet to share their taxes with the voting public. While some candidates have divulged snapshots of their taxes during previous runs for lower office, only five candidates have made any additional returns public since they hit the 2020 trail—and only four shared their returns for the 2018 fiscal year ahead of the April 15 Tax Day deadline. Some of these slow-to-share Democrats have been among the biggest critics of Trump’s secrecy and deceptiveness, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed. Over the last several weeks, the national media has spilled a sea of ink in its attempts to deride, defend, or comprehend Bernie Sanders’ decision not to disclose his documents yet.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/tax-returns-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-cory-booker-kamala-harris-beto-orourke-gillibrand-castro-klobuchar-buttigieg/