Over at The Pulse, Clint Cline deftly explains why Donald Trump’s lie about self-funding and his refusal to self-fund to a large enough degree are inexplicably connected to his failure to release his tax returns — a failure that will play into Hillary Clinton’s hands after the Republican National Convention, at which time the ilk of Lois Lerner at the IRS will surely leak the returns and show whatever devastating bombshell is surely to be within.
[A]bsent a tax return as proof of his PFD assertions, we’ll never really know for sure if he’s a financial genius or a charlatan. Are Trump’s unwillingness to self-fund and his unwillingness to reveal his tax returns two strands from the same cord?… Unless and until Trump follows the standard practice of previous modern era presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and John McCain and Mitt Romney, and releases his full tax returns, voters won’t know the truth. But whatever the truth is to why Trump won’t self-fund — whether simple greed or poor management leading to a liquidity crisis — the fact remains that Trump’s refusal to self-fund is forcing a major crisis in the Republican Party. After all, putting the world’s wealthiest economy in the hands of someone who can’t manage his own checkbook just might be problematic…. Where are those tax returns, Mr. Trump?
John Fund, writing several times on this subject here at NRO, is right: If Trump does not release his returns, then delegates should not vote for him, because he will not have been forthcoming enough to earn their trust:
Some Trump delegates and their alternates should write him an open letter demanding his unredacted tax returns. If he declines, they should declare they will abstain on the first ballot of the convention, driving him below the number needed to nominate. The delegates should not give Republicans a time bomb that could help take down GOP control of the House or the Senate, or both….
A New Jersey superior-court judge concluded that Trump was an untrustworthy source of financial data on himself. That decision was upheld by a three-judge appeals court, which noted that the “materials that Trump claims to have provided to O’Brien were incomplete and unaudited.” The court then went on to quote a Fortune magazine article detailing numerous examples of Trump’s exaggerating about his wealth.
Those fibs have continued to the present day.