Donald Trump Jr. alleged that the New York Times published an exhaustive investigation into President Donald Trump’s decades of tax avoidance to aid Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the debate.
The Times published an extensive look at two decades of Trump’s tax returns, showing he paid no federal income taxes for 10 years.
He paid just $750 in income tax the year he won the presidency and another $750 the year he entered the White House, according to the Times.
The average tax rate for the top 0.001% of earners is 24%.
"Over the past two decades, Mr. Trump has paid about $400 million less in combined federal income taxes than a very wealthy person who paid the average for that group each year," The Times reported.
Don Jr. Blasts NYT:
“Of course the New York Times does this. They put out a selective, you know, picture of all of these things the day before a debate to try to give someone like Joe Biden, you know, an attack line,” Trump Jr. claimed in an interview with Fox News. “They come up with one or two catchy sound bites, and that's the game.”
He went on to question why the Times was not looking at Hunter Biden.
"If only they spent as much time looking for maybe, I don't know, Hunter Biden's tax returns and the Biden family issues, where Hunter's taking money from a known associate of Vladimir Putin...Think about that," he said.
Don Jr. defends tax avoidance:
"Listen, it's ridiculous, my father's paid tens of millions of taxes," Trump Jr. insisted. "If he does things in certain years where you get depreciation, where you get the write-off, where you get historical tax credits.”
"That was literally a government contract. We bid against every hotel company in the world, historical tax credits that you use to offset tax payments for taking the risk to build that,” he added. “That was done under the Obama administration. It literally took an act of Congress to get it done. So with that comes historical tax credits. That's the reality. People don't understand what goes into a business.”