Sen. Lindsey Graham floated the idea for a law to require all presidential hopefuls to release their tax returns. | Getty Graham: Require 2020 candidates to release tax returns

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday he wants all presidential candidates to be required by law to release their tax returns, starting in 2020.

The South Carolina Republican said his proposal would include Donald Trump if the president seeks reelection.


“I think that prospectively what I'll do is, any candidate running in 2020 needs to release their tax returns,” Graham told reporters. Asked how he would enforce this, he responded: “You just make it a law.” He then explained that the law would apply to Trump, “if he’s a candidate for president” in 2020.

Graham is one of Trump’s fiercest GOP critics, calling for a select committee to investigate Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and speaking out against some of Trump’s most incendiary claims, including his insistence that massive voter fraud is what caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

Congressional Democrats have been looking for ways to force Trump to release his tax returns, which he refused to do on the campaign trail despite decades of precedence. So far, Republicans have thwarted these efforts.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), though, signaled in a recent interview she was open to issuing a subpoena for the returns as part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s larger investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.