Trump Tax Returns: Business Failures May Have Kept Him From Paying Taxes For 18 Years

An anonymous source has mailed three pages of Donald Trump's 1995 income tax returns to a reporter at the New York Times.

The pages indicate that Trump declared a $916 million loss that year in connection to the "mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan," the newspaper reports.

Trump lost almost $1 billion in one year running casinos??? Think on that for a minute.

According to the NYT, the loss could have allowed Trump to avoid paying federal income taxes up to $50 million for the next 18 years.

Trump's campaign issued a statement which read, in part:

“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes, along with very substantial charitable contributions.”

"Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it."

The New York Times has obtained portions of Donald Trump's 1995 income tax returns that indicate he may not have paid any federal income taxes for almost two decades.

The three pages from Trump's tax returns, which were mailed to the NYT by an anonymous source, showed that Trump declared a $916 million loss that year due to "mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan," the newspaper reports.

The loss would have allowed Trump to avoid paying federal income taxes on up to $50 million for each of the ensuing 18 years, the NYT notes. One of Trump's lawyers has already threatened to sue the NYT for publishing the returns, but his campaign appeared to confirm the validity of the newspaper's report in a statement.

“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the statement said. “That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the NYT's scoop is the fact that the person who mailed the pages from Trump's tax returns to the newspaper listed their return address as Trump Tower.