Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump and his staffers promised numerous times that Trump would release his tax returns, claiming that he would do so as soon as an I.R.S. audit was finished. It is not clear whether there was actually an ongoing audit and in any case absolutely no reason that an audit would stop Trump from releasing his returns. But that was Trump’s claim. He would release his tax returns after the audit, he said over and over again, directly and on camera. He was lying the whole time, as his staff finally admitted today. No surprise.

“The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns,” Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway told ABC’s “This Week” today. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care.”

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A recent poll found that 60 percent of Americans believe he has a responsibility to release his tax returns and more than 200,000 have signed a petition to the White House requesting that he do so.

What Conway means by “litigate” is that many demanded Trump release his tax returns as has been a standard transparency practice for presidential candidates for decades and Trump dodged and obfuscated by promising that he would do so after an audit was completed. Now, after his win in the electoral college, he is breaking that promise.

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Because of Trump’s business interests and the tangled and massive potential for corruption, conflicts of interest, and entanglements with foreign governments, the American people ought to be able to get a look at the only documentation that can come close to clearing the air. It’s worth noting that Conway offered no substantive reason not to release them. She didn’t even bother to try. Trump is going to keep being asked about this and presumably is going to keep beclowning himself by dithering or lying. The only logical explanation is that there is something damning in the tax returns and Trump is desperate to hide that from the citizens he ostensibly serves.

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