Trump 'Knowingly' Committed Dozens of Tax Crimes: Biographer

A Donald Trump biographer said this week that the former president "knowingly" committed dozens of tax crimes over the past several years.

David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of the bestselling biography The Making of Donald Trump, published a story in the DC Report on Tuesday about tax crimes Trump allegedly committed "during the six years when he ran for office and was President."

"One technique he used at least 26 times between 2015 and 2020 was as simple as it was flagrant," Johnston wrote. "Trump filed sole proprietor reports, known as Schedule C, that showed huge business expenses despite having zero revenue. That created losses which Trump used to offset his income from work and investments, thus lowering his income taxes. Additional Schedule Cs had expenses exactly equal to revenues while only a few showed profits."

The comments by Johnston come shortly after Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee held a vote to publicly release Trump's tax return documents. While the full documents have yet to be released, the committee published a report showing that Trump was not properly audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) while he was president. The IRS has a policy requiring that a sitting president is audited each year while in office.

Johnston wrote in the article that he broke a story in 2016 about a trial the former president lost over his income tax documents from 1984.

"In short, Trump's tax returns are a rich environment in which questionable conduct is found throughout the filings and needs only seasoned auditors to uncover fictional expenses," Johnston wrote.

Johnston then went on to discuss part of the summary report released by the House committee and explained that in 2016, Trump paid just $750 in income tax.

"Over the six years, he paid $776,126 in net federal income tax," Johnston wrote. "That's just half of one percent of his positive income, the equivalent of a married couple earning $100,000 paying $500 instead of the typical $8,500. The typical tax rate for Trump's income class is more than 25%.

"Considering that Trump headed our government for four years while obviously cheating on his income taxes, his case deserves whatever resources it takes to bring him to civil and criminal justice."

Following the summary report released by the House, former federal prosecutor and West Coast Trial Lawyers President Neama Rahmani told Newsweek: "Depending on what the returns show, tax evasion may ultimately be Trump's biggest legal problem."

Newsweek reached out to Trump's spokesperson for comment.