Clinton ad spotlights Republicans pressing Trump to release tax returns

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton today released her 2015 income tax return, in her latest bid to up the pressure on rival Donald Trump to follow suit.

The return shows the Clintons' income fell significantly after she started hitting the campaign trail — from $27.9 million in 2014 to about $10.6 million in 2015. The Clintons paid $3.6 million in taxes in 2015, their return shows.


The campaign also released 10 years of returns from Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine.

In 2015, Bill and Hillary Clinton paid an effective federal income tax rate of 34.2 percent on an adjusted gross income of $10,594,529. Their combined effective rate — including state and local taxes — was 43.2 percent. The Clintons donated $1.04 million, or 9.8 percent of their income, to charity.

The Clinton Foundation received $1 million of the charitable donations; the rest, $42,000, went to Desert Classic Charities, a nonprofit that the foundation partners with on the Humana Challenge charity golf tournament.

The bulk of the Clintons' income came from Bill Clinton's speaking fees, which brought in $4.4 million in 2015, while Hillary Clinton earned $1.1 million from her own speaking engagements — a significant drop from past years as she replaced paid speeches with campaigning.

The couple's income also included $3 million that Hillary Clinton earned in book revenue and $1.6 million from Bill Clinton's consulting work. The Clintons reported earning a total of $149 million in the nine years between 2007 and 2015.

The Clintons paid a relatively high effective tax rate compared to other wealthy Americans because of how they earned their money, said Dave Kautter, a partner at the advisory firm RSM.

Much of their money came from their speaking engagements, writings and consulting, all of which is subject to ordinary income tax rates that top out at 39.6 percent. Typically with multimillionaire, said Kautter, “as the income goes up, usually more and more of your income comes from [lower-taxed] capital gains, and that’s not the case with the Clintons.”

Kaine's returns show he paid an effective federal rate of 20.3 percent on $313,441 in income in 2015.

The Virginia senator and his wife, Anne Holton, donated $21,290, about 7.5 percent of their income, to charity last year. Their average effective federal tax rate over the last decade was 18 percent. The rate ranged from as little as 13.4 percent in 2009 to 24 percent in 2011.

The Kaines’ income dipped as low as $153,000 in 2012, when he was running for the Senate. He won election that year, after serving as head of the Democratic National Committee, governor of Virginia and lieutenant governor

Clinton's team has been pushing Trump to release his tax returns — something presidential candidates have done for decades — since before he became the GOP's official nominee.

Trump has refused, citing an ongoing IRS audit, among other reasons. The IRS has said there is no rule preventing someone under audit from releasing their returns, but Trump said his lawyers advised him against it.

Trump also has refused to release previous returns that are not under audit, providing a letter from his tax lawyers that said “continuing transactions” mean “the pending examinations are continuations of prior, closed examinations” from before 2008.

Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri said Trump "is hiding behind fake excuses and backtracking on his previous promises to release his tax returns. He has failed to provide the public with the most basic financial information disclosed by every major candidate in the last 40 years. What is he trying to hide?”

The drumbeat has increased in recent weeks as the general election campaign has heated up, with Clinton and Kaine referring to the real estate developer's tax returns constantly on the campaign trail and releasing an online ad Friday highlighting top Republicans’ calls for Trump to release them.

The move has echoes of President Barack Obama's effort in 2012 to get Mitt Romney to release his tax returns, which Democrats were convinced would play into their effort to paint the former private equity executive as out of touch with common Americans.

But the 2016 version of that push goes further: People around Clinton have hinted that he could have paid no federal income tax at all, or that his returns would reveal previously unreported business dealings with Russian entities that could prove politically complicated for him in the wake of the Democratic National Committee hack that was almost certainly undertaken by Russia.

Perhaps even worse for Trump, given that his political rise was based on touting his own business success, is the possibility that his returns could reveal he made far less money than he claims, Clinton allies say.

And it's an opportunity for Clinton to make headway on an issue that has repeatedly dogged her throughout her campaign: her trustworthiness and honesty. She and her husband have released decades' worth of tax returns in an effort to be transparent, even when it means revealing astronomical speaking fees and incomes that are far from the average American's.

Already this election year, Clinton's speaking fees have been a major problem for her. Her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, skewered her for giving private speeches to major Wall Street firms. She pledged to release the transcripts of those talks only if all her opponents — both Democrat and Republican — did the same for their own private speeches.

That never happened on either side.

Pushing to be so open with the actual tax returns, however, is a move intended to be seen as a significant step for a candidate whose financial controversies date back to the late 1970s, and whose email scandal and Clinton Foundation dust-ups continue to give voters reason to question her honesty. Adding Kaine's returns to the mix — given his reputation as an honest broker — is a move to bolster that step.

Clinton's trustworthiness numbers have reached record lows in public polling this year — only surpassed by Trump's.

