Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is seizing on a New York Times report about rival Donald Trump's taxes as a sign of his business failures and evidence he may not have paid taxes for years.
Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook said in a statement that "this bombshell report reveals the colossal nature of Donald Trump's past business failures and just how long he may have avoided paying any federal income taxes whatsoever."
Mook says the report shows Trump lost nearly a billion dollars, "stiffed small businesses, laid off workers, and walked away from hardworking communities."
And he said Trump "apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades."
He challenged Trump to go ahead and release his returns."
Tax records obtained by The New York Times show that Donald Trump's business losses in 1995 were so large that they could have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years.
In a story published online late Saturday, The Times said it anonymously received the first pages of Trump's 1995 state income tax filings in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The filings show a net loss of $915,729,293 in federal taxable income for the year.
That Trump was losing money during the early to mid-1990s — a period marked by bankruptcies and poor business decisions — was already well established. But the records obtained by the Times show losses of such a magnitude that they potentially allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes for years, possibly until the end of the last decade.
Trump's campaign released a statement on Saturday lashing out at the Times for publishing the records and accused the newspaper of working to benefit the Republican nominee's presidential rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.