“You learn very little from a tax return,” Donald Trump insisted. | Getty Trump clarifies position on releasing tax returns

Donald Trump may release his tax returns after all, the presumptive Republican nominee told Fox News host Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday.

“You said you don’t intend to release your tax returns,” Van Susteren began, referencing comments Trump made to the Associated Press.


“I didn’t say that. I said I’m being audited,” Trump quickly shot back. “There’s a link between that and other things.”

After claiming that he is audited “every single year,” Trump said that he would in fact release the returns, ideally sooner than Nov. 8.

“So, the answer is, I’ll release. Hopefully before the election I’ll release,” he said. “And I’d like to release.”

According to a February statement from the Internal Revenue Service, however, “Nothing prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information" — not even an audit. The IRS also denied that it used audits as a political weapon, as Trump has claimed.

But there’s not much to learn from the documents in any case, the Manhattan billionaire told Van Susteren.

“You learn very little from a tax return,” he insisted, noting that he’s released other financial documents in compliance with Federal Elections Commission rules.

According to The Associated Press, Trump said in an interview that “he doesn’t believe he has an obligation to release his tax returns and won’t release them before November unless an ongoing audit of his finances is completed before Election Day,” but the news agency did not provide a direct quote.

Trump sought to clarify his position on Wednesday, tweeting, “In interview I told @AP that my taxes are under routine audit and I would release my tax returns when audit is complete, not after election!”

Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier who recently backed Trump, told Fox News that the real estate mogul’s reluctance is due to “the complication of the return, the fact that he’s under an audit, he feels that he doesn’t want to give out that information to the general public and have a whole nightmare situation with opposition research trying to pick holes through the return.”

None of these explanations was good enough for Mitt Romney, who blasted Trump in a Wednesday afternoon Facebook post.

“It is disqualifying for a modern-day presidential nominee to refuse to release tax returns to the voters, especially one who has not been subject to public scrutiny in either military or public service. Tax returns provide the public with its sole confirmation of the veracity of a candidate’s representations regarding charities, priorities, wealth, tax conformance, and conflicts of interest,” Romney wrote.

In February 2015, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he would “certainly” release at least some of his returns if he ran for the White House, and that he had “no objection” to doing so.

“I would release tax returns,” Trump said, “and I would also explain to people that as a person that’s looking to make money, I’m in the business of making money ... and if I won, I’d make money for our country.”