‘What are you hiding?’: Biden taunts Trump over tax returns after court decision delays release yet again

President has repeatedly said he cannot release years of tax returns while under audit – a claim with no legal basis

As Donald Trump won a temporary legal victory in his fight to keep his tax returns private, Joe Biden once again ribbed him for not releasing them after more than four years of falsely claiming an audit prohibits him from doing so.

“I’ve released 21 years of my tax returns,” the Democratic candidate wrote on Twitter. “What are you hiding, @realDonaldTrump?”

The latest decision, handed down by a federal appeals court, has blocked a subpoena issued by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. for eight years of the president’s tax returns. The court will now consider the Trump team’s argument that the subpoena is “wildly overbroad” and a form of “harassment” before deciding whether it can be upheld.

And with only two months to go until the election, the latest decision means the returns may well not be released before polling day.

While this means a potentially catastrophic legal risk to Mr Trump and his family has briefly been put on hold, it also allows Mr Biden to keep up one of his most consistent and most effective lines of attack against the incumbent president.

Mr Biden has many times demanded Mr Trump release his returns, including well before he became the Democratic nominee. He has referred to Mr Trump as “the most corrupt president we’ve ever had”, and in late 2019, his campaign began selling T-shirts reading “release your tax returns or shut up” – quoting a video Mr Biden himself released as the president ramped up his accusations against the candidate’s son, Hunter.

In an interview on Irish TV in 2014, he said that if he ever decided to run for office he would “absolutely” release his tax return. Instead, since he was first standing in the presidential primaries, Mr Trump has insisted that he will not (and sometimes that he cannot) release his tax returns while under audit from the IRS.

“Tax experts throughout the media agree that no sane person would give their tax returns during an audit,” he tweeted in early 2016. “After the audit, no problem!”

He has cited this excuse repeatedly in the ensuing years – even as many tax experts and lawyers have publicly made clear that being under audit does not prevent any individual, even a president, from making their returns public.

The case working its way through the New York courts has thus become a major thorn in Mr Trump’s side. He was enraged this summer when the US Supreme Court ruled that his records could be scrutinised by Mr Vance’s team, complaining: “This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!”

The next day, Mr Biden weighed in again: “The American people deserve to know what Donald Trump is hiding in his tax returns.”