Hillary Clinton needled Donald Trump on Wednesday for not releasing his tax returns, questioning why the presumptive GOP nominee has put out scant information about how much he makes and pays in taxes.
Trump has several times changed his position on whether he will release his tax returns now that he is the presumptive Republican nominee, giving a series of interviewers different answers for much of 2016.
Clinton had yet to hit Trump for not releasing his taxes until today and her spokesman said that she had not planned to hit Trump for his tax returns at the event before a man yelled about Trump’s taxes at Camden County College on Wednesday.
“Here is what Donald Trump wants to do. He has released just one detailed proposal in this whole campaign,” Clinton said, referring to the candidate’s tax plan.
“What about his tax returns,” shouted a man in the audience, to which, Clinton responded, “Well, we are going to get to that.”
“What about his taxes? We will get around to that too. Because when you run for president, especially when you become the nominee that is kind of expected,” Clinton said. “My husband and I have released 33 years of tax returns, we’ve got eight years on our website right now. So you have got to ask yourself, why does he not release them?”
Trump, after saying in February 2015 that he “would release tax returns,” told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday “there’s nothing to learn from them.”
Trump in late March released a letter from his tax attorneys confirming that the billionaire real estate mogul’s tax filings from 2009 onward remain under review by the IRS. Still, Trump has also refused to release his tax returns from previous years, which are no longer under IRS audit.
By not releasing his taxes, Trump would be breaking with long held precedent that both major political parties have set.
Clinton’s campaign released her tax returns from 2007 to 2014 in August 2015. In a lengthy statement and on her campaign website, Clinton detailed that she and her husband made $141 million over the course of eight years and paid $43 million in federal taxes.
With this release, the campaign said 38 years of Clinton tax returns have been available to the press over the course of her career, dating back to 1977.
During the event, Clinton also hit Trump for proposing a tax plan that, she said, would “spend three trillion dollars, that is with a T, three trillion dollars on tax cuts for people like him who make over a million dollars.”
“He has released what he calls his tax plan and it very clearly is his tax plan because Donald Trump’s tax plan was written by a billionaires for billionaires,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s campaign has sought to discredit Trump’s tax plan ever since he released it, holding two conference calls for reporters on the topic this week.
Neera Tanden, a former Clinton aide and the head of the Center for American Progress, said on a call Wednesday that “Trump is now trying to cover up the bald spots in his economic plan but women can see for themselves and women can see through his comb over.”
Clinton has turned her focus almost exclusively to Trump in recent weeks, largely ignoring Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her Democratic primary opponent who has pledged to run all the way into June.
Trump all but locked up the Republican nomination last week, turning his attention to Clinton by starting to attack the candidate for her husband’s sexual impropriety in 1990s.
On Wednesday, Clinton said she was not going to respond to those lines of attack.
“I am not going to respond to the insults and the attacks coming from Donald Trump in this campaign,” Clinton said. “He can say whatever he wants to say about me personally.”
