Earlier this month, The New York Times obtained Donald Trump's tax records, which suggested he may have avoided paying taxes for a whopping two decades. On Monday evening, the Times obtained new documents that showed Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income in the early 1990s. How? By using a loophole "so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited."
The maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, allowed Trump to avoid paying tens of millions of dollars in taxes. "Whatever loophole existed was not 'exploited' here, but stretched beyond any recognition," Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s, told the Times.