Rep. Jason Chaffetz called on Donald Trump Wednesday to “open up (his) kimono” and release his tax returns and medical records.
The Utah Republican and House Oversight Committee chairman added his voice to a chorus of prominent Republican lawmakers appealing to the GOP presidential candidate to be more transparent about his wealth and health.
“If you’re going to run and try to become the president of the United States, you’re going to have to open up your kimono and show everything, your tax returns, your medical records,” Chaffetz told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on “The Lead” after he criticized Hillary Clinton for allegedly allowing lines to blur between her family’s charity, the Clinton Foundation, and the State Department while she was at its helm.
Chaffetz continued: “You’re just going to have to do that, it’s too important. So both candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, should show both their medical records and tax returns, absolutely.”
Earlier this month, Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy also told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Trump should make his tax returns available to the public.
“We deserve all the information about these candidates that we can get our hands on to make an educated vote in November,” Duffy said during an interview on “The Situation Room.”
Trump has said he will release his tax returns when he is no longer being audited. In refusing to release the returns, he has broken with decades of modern presidential campaign precedent.
Clinton’s campaign recently began airing a new television ad that hits the real estate mogul for refusing to be more open with his tax returns, despite his claim in a 2014 interview with an Irish television station that he “absolutely” would.
Clinton released her 2015 tax returns earlier this month and eight years of personal income tax returns in 2015.
Meanwhile, both candidates have faced questions about their physical fitness for the Oval Office.
Like Clinton, Trump has released minimal medical information, most notably in the form of a December 2015 letter of a few paragraphs from his personal physician, a gastroenterologist, that described his blood pressure and lab results as “astonishingly excellent” while suggesting a President Trump would be the “healthiest individual ever elected.”
But Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, found much of that language surprising and, in some cases, almost comically lacking in objective data.
