The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump entered Christmas week 2022 with one more leak in the wall around his finances: the House Ways and Means Committee had already voted to make six years of his tax returns public, but the documents were still not in voters’ hands. On Dec. 20, the committee approved the release on a 24-16 vote, covering tax years 2015 through 2020 and setting up a disclosure that would come later. The vote changed the legal posture of the case, but it did not itself put the returns online. They were released on Dec. 30. citeturn0search0turn0search1

The committee’s report argued that the IRS had delayed parts of the mandatory audit process and that Congress had authority to review the filings as part of its oversight work. Republicans blasted the move as an abuse of power and said the committee was treating private tax records as a political weapon. That dispute was already on the record by the time this edition went to press, even though the actual release had not yet happened. citeturn0search0turn0search1

The important chronology is simple: the vote came first, the public release came later. So the real story on Dec. 25 was not that Trump’s tax returns had already landed in public view. It was that the committee had cleared the way for that to happen and that the last barrier was gone. The documents themselves would not become public until after Christmas, on Dec. 30. citeturn0search0turn0search1