Trump Kept His Chinese Bank Account, Records Show

Donald Trump insisted in response to a question during a 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden that he closed down his bank account in China before his first campaign. But six years of Trump’s tax records released Friday reveal that wasn’t true, Mary Papenfuss reported for HuffPost.

Photo Insert: The former president had bank accounts in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to his tax records.

“I had an account open, and I closed it,” Trump said with some irritation to moderator Kristen Welker, NBC White House correspondent, in the final debate of the campaign in October that year. “I closed it before I even ran for president, let alone became president.”

In short, he lied. Representative-elect Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, noted that the former president had bank accounts in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to his tax records.

Trump, who had accounts in a number of countries and also collected income from more than a dozen foreign nations while in office, paid more in taxes in 2020 to the Chinese government than he did in US federal income tax that year, his returns revealed.

Trump also lied a month earlier to then-Fox News commentator Chris Wallace, who pointedly asked him during the first presidential debate in 2020 if he paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, as The New York Times had reported (which Trump immediately blasted as “fake news.”) Trump angrily responded — twice — that he had paid “millions of dollars.”

His returns revealed that indeed he had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in each of those years. Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income tax in 2020, the last full year he was in office, according to the tax records.

In addition, Trump did not annually donate his $400,000 presidential salary to charity, as he has claimed. He declared no charitable contributions of any kind on his 2020 returns.

Trump enjoyed an adjusted gross income of $15.8 million during his first three years in office. Trump paid $642,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $750 in 2016 and in 2017, just under $1 million in 2018, $133,000 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.

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