“The president has no intention” to release his tax returns along with his tax reform package, Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday. | AP Photo Mnuchin: Trump has 'no intention' of releasing his tax returns

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that Americans have “plenty of information on” President Donald Trump’s taxes and should not expect his tax returns to be made public as the White House pushes its tax reform package.

Breaking with decades of political tradition, Trump refused during last year’s presidential campaign to release his tax returns, explaining that he was under audit. The IRS has said publicly that there is no regulation prohibiting an individual under audit from releasing their tax returns, but Trump has said that he will not release his, on the advice of his lawyers, until the audit is complete.


Without Trump’s tax returns, it would be impossible to fully understand how the tax reform proposal rolled out Wednesday by Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn would affect Trump and his family’s business empire. But speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room, Mnuchin said the public already has learned enough about Trump’s finances.

“The president has no intention” of releasing his tax returns along with his tax reform package, Mnuchin said Wednesday. “The president has released plenty of information, and I think has given more financial disclosure than anybody else. I think the American population has plenty of information on his taxes.”

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Trump’s tax reform package, the broad strokes of which were laid out Wednesday by Mnuchin and Cohn, would dramatically alter how individuals and businesses pay their taxes. Among other proposals, the plan would shrink the number of individual tax brackets from seven to three and lower the corporate tax rate. Taken together, Cohn said the package represents “one of the biggest tax cuts in the American history.”

Although Trump has refused to release his tax returns, some of them have trickled out. Last October, The New York Times published a bombshell report detailing the president’s 1995 tax return, a year in which he reported losses of nearly $1 billion. More recently, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow broadcast details from two pages of the president’s 2005 tax return, which showed that he earned $150 million that year and payed $38 million in federal income taxes.