What Trump tried to hide: The long-secret tax returns show that he’s not so rich or so smart

As David Cay Johnston laid out in these pages yesterday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has the goods to nail Donald Trump for tax fraud. The DA should move forward quickly on an investigation and prosecution.

Johnston, the premier Trumpologist, made his conclusions using five years of Trump’s personal and business federal tax returns that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richie Neal published before handing the gavel to Republicans, who fiercely opposed the transparency.

Threats that they will retaliate and publish the returns of Joe Biden or Barack Obama or the Clintons are hollow. All those documents have long been public, as have those of both Bushes and Ronald Reagan, as have the returns of every president and candidate going back to Nixon’s time.

Before now, the only glimpse of Trump’s income was the first page from his 1995 state returns filed with New York, New Jersey and Connecticut that were mysteriously mailed to the Daily News and the New York Times in September 2016, days before that fall’s first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University on Long Island. You remember, when Trump said that paying zero federal taxes, “makes me smart.”

Either smart, or a bad businessman who racked up huge losses, as we all suspected.

Even as he was spouting on the stage, sitting in the Mazars accounting office in Woodbury, 20 minutes from Hofstra, was his 2015 return (he had a six month extension so it wasn’t due until Oct. 15). Mazars, which dropped Trump as a client last February and warned that the documents should not be relied on, soon submitted the 539-page return with a 1040 with all its schedules and 159 separate statements. It was stamped received by the IRS’s Kansas City Submission Processing Center on Oct. 20 and is now public.

He’s not such a rich man. His adjusted gross income was negative, mostly from a Net Operating Loss carryover of $105,157,825. He had to pay the IRS $707,123. No wonder the fraud didn’t want Americans to see.