In a lengthy and wide-ranging telephone press conference today called by Hillary Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson, Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer, and Policy Director Neera Tanden, I asked the following question:
I've seen reports that Senator Clinton will be producing some kind of financial information next week, but the details have been a little vague. Will Senator Clinton be producing her complete 2000 through 2006 tax returns, including all schedules, next week?
Wolfson responded:
Sen Clinton said ... that she would be producing her tax returns within the week, and we are endeavoring to do just that. And as to - I'm not fully conversant enough to know what the distinction is between schedules and other tax information, so I don't want to give you an answer that is incorrect, but I am quite confident that all of the information that the public needs and that reporters need to make very, very informed judgments about their finances will be made available.... [O]f course they have filed annual financial disclosure forms while Senator Clinton was in the Senate that details [sic] the sources of their income, and obviously tax returns will provide additional information, and I am confident that you and others will have ample opportunity to look at them and if you have followup questions of course we'll be available to answer them, but I am quite confident that all information that is necessary to make very good judgments about their finances will be made available.
I asked a followup:
Scanning and posting tax returns is a fairly simple process. Why is there any delay at all in making her returns available?
Wolfson responded:
You know, why was there delay in Senator Obama's making his returns available....? You know, we'll have them within the week, you'll have an opportunity to look at them, you can turn a skeptical eye to them as you may care to and if you have followup questions about them we'll be happy to answer them, but they'll be available online.... and people will be able to take a look at them.
I admit it: I'm a cynic. I saw no news reports or press releases in which Clinton herself promised to produce tax returns next week - but maybe it just wasn't publicized. I still don't understand why it takes more than 24 hours to have a staffer scan and post tax returns; some bloggers and commentors have articulated fears that the Clintons are using this time to have their returns doctored, and while I don't share those fears, posting the returns immediately after Obama did would have snuffed out any such speculation. It also strikes me as a little funny that someone as well-informed and sophisticated as Wolfson doesn't know what tax schedules are - they're simply the attachments that go with the Form 1040 whenever a taxpayer itemizes his or her deductions or has investment income, as the Clintons (and Wolfson) certainly do. And the length and repetitiveness of his answer makes me mindful of the Queen's comment in Hamlet: "the lady doth protest too much, methinks." As one person has exegised the line, "[s]omeone who is telling the truth [usually does so] ... rather plainly and shortly. Someone who is assuring too much is usually lying either to herself or to the audience"- ie, it implies that "the lady" "will break her word."
But I'm tired of being cynical, and I'm going to trust that the lady's word is good. I'm looking forward to next week, when we'll all know exactly how good it is.
To those who encouraged Clinton to do the right thing by participating in the "Tax Fax" grassroots campaign (outlined on both The Huffington Post and VichyDems) by faxing copies of their own tax returns, with personal info deleted, to Clinton's campaign offices - you can stand down. THANK YOU, and GOOD WORK! BACK TO VICHYDEMS HOME
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What is as interesting to me is, what kind of smoke screen (really meaning attack against Obama) will the Clinton surrogates launch at the same time these, so called, financial statements ( which really are supposed to be her tax returns) are made available?
"producing some kind of financial information" and "the details have been a little vague"
sums it up for me. I am skeptical that satisfactory disclosure will be forthcoming, especially with the Paul v Clinton civil trial looming.
MSM doesn"t report much on this as opposed to the Obama/Rezko connection.
Politifact"s Bill Adair said he would check it out. The did check out the Rezko story.
Personally, I want to see if there is any info that shed"s light on the upcoming fraud case, last I heard, proceeding in California, discovery will commence in May with a trial date expected by December 2008.
From an article:
Commencing on August 14, 2000, through the present day- Hillary has denied accepting any money at all from Hollywood Dot com Millionaire Peter Paul through two deceptive articles in the Washington Post, false statements by Hillary's attorney David Kendall, four false FEC reports, false statements to FEC investigators and General Counsel and a false sworn declaration in the civil fraud case that included Hillary as a co-defendant- Paul v Clinton.
Hillary Redacted Clinton will provide as little as possible on the tax returns. I say this because initially, she said she would only provide them once she won the primary. Then under pressure, she said she needed until April 15th, implying a general tax date that would not include the previous six years. Then under pressure she said she would provide them in time which hopefully will be this week, but, one can't help but think they are being "reviewed for content" and have been for weeks.
Don't forget - her WH schedules were only made available after JW sued for them. And even then they were heavily edited for content. The Clintons have not been vetted since 1996.
Just a financial but one heck of a spread $10 Mill too $50 mill? If your going to go thru them there are about 47 pages stocks, bonds, royalties etc in them
Hillary Clinton (D-NY) - 2006 Politician Profile Net Worth: From $10,360,009 to $51,021,998 Ranks 9th among all members of the Senate. Assets: 10 totaling $10,460,009 to $51,052,000. Liabilities: 2 totaling $30,002 to $100,000.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/candlook.php?txtName=clinton
http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/CIDsummary.php?CID=N00000019&year=2006
http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/candlook.php?capcode=h3mpd&CID=N00000019&submit=Submit
Marc Rich Make Rich??
"I am quite confident that all of the information that the public needs and that reporters need to make very, very informed judgments about their finances will be made available"
Since the Clintons feel that the public doesn't need ANY of this information, that's a good indication of what we will get.
What the public needs is the entire tax return (as filed with the IRS) including the schedules and statements.
i know this is hilary bashing but i could produce my tax returns in a matter of minutes, copies are in file cabinet in our study and guess what my accountant also has a copy. the rest of you who are still using thinking with their brains can fill in the rest.
I find it amazing that Wolfson doesn't know the difference between Schedules and other tax information. He's setting us up for disappointment. He talked to us like children, as if we are too stupid to know what he's up to.
Just wait and see; no schedules will be released, or only a few.
Schedules tell the WHOLE story
Why would they want to change their dissembelling ways now? Not even with a gun to their heads...
Does anyone actually believe the Clintons didn't have their tax returns doctored by someone working inside of the IRS? It takes thirty minutes to go to Kinkos and make a copy of your tax returns, so why has it taken the Clintons over six months? I'm betting that the Clintons don't want people to find out how they parlayed their time in the White House into a couple hundred million dollars. Furthermore, with all that new found wealth, I'll bet their charitable contributions are considerably less than Obama's. And you know they don't want the masses to find out how closely aligned Hillary and Bill are with multinational/Arab corporations.
The public needs 100%. Not one line less.
When you have ultra rich people threaten Pelosi on your behalf, you need to show that you haven't and wont be indebted to them. That letter is worse'er,er than 5 mil to your campaign.
100% or let the Bullshit excuses fly.
The Clintons are stocking up on sharpies to redact certain information, then the returns will be released. By the way, Carville has been on a steady stream of raw meat now for two weeks. He will be released upon the press soon. Get your shots.
I wonder if this will be like her White House records with passages blocked out. Yeah I know they said it was to protect certain names but whatever.
I will believe she will show us her tax returns when she actually produces them. My guess is that there will be nothing in them important, causing people to ask what the hell was the big deal anyway. Why make us wait for nothing? Is this how long it takes to manufacture records?
A day late and a dollar short on this issue.
Maybe they're too busy dealing with all the faxes of tax returns from bloggers, that were sent in to Clinton's campain offices. Some people will never grow up. What a cheap and tawdry stunt. I'll bet the perpetrators are giggling like a bunch of 3rd graders who put gum on someone's chair.
cheap and tawdry?
it's good clean activism. and frankly, if the candidate was more forthcoming then it wouldn't be necessary. what is the purpose of keeping tax returns secret? who is the candidate that talks about how "vetted" they are? the same one who has kept her tax returns secret. vetted, yeah right.
This is important; I want to make it clear that the "tax fax" campaign was more responsible than KDH makes it sound -- and apparently more effective:
Even after Obama posted his returns, Clinton said she wouldn't produce hers until 4/19. Then 13,000+ people checked out the "tax fax" one day, some percentage sent faxes -- and immediately she moves things up by nearly a month.
I don't know how many sent faxes, and I don't know for certain what prompted her to change, but it wasn't pressure from the mainstream media (there was none) -- so maybe grassroots democracy helped her open up.
Am I "giggling like a 3rd grader?" No, but anytime I see a flicker of life in Lincoln's government of/by/for the people, I permit myself to smile. Briefly.
Also, the "tax fax" post made it very clear that people should NOT fax her Senate offices, and said:
"Do your best to fax a local campaign office, not the national one. That way, the load will be spread among many fax machines, rather than jamming up a few important ones and making them unusable... Again: we're sending a message, not doing a dirty trick by jamming her lines. Contact information for Clinton's various campaign offices can be found...
So: responsible yes, effective maybe, cheap and tawdry not so much.
A week to do what? Still waiting for those tax returns, Sen. Clinton. Sleep all night, you don't have to answer the phone.
At the end of the day Hillary is like any other American who wants to build a nest egg for retirement. The only problem with Hillary's income is that it was most probably obtained through questionable ties to benefactors of both Bill and herself. Such financial entanglements truely question the veracity of Hillary's so-called vision for economic equality for all. How despicable !
So HuffPo is among the baying hounds yelping for Hillary's tax returns, and this post also gets in a dig about Obama's.
Must be that McCain gets no mention because he long ago published his and there's nothing there, right?
That's what I thought till I came across this jawdropper:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200803140010
What gives? Is this all as one-sided as it looks, or am I missing something?
Another commentor asked about this earlier. My own blog, VichyDems (http://vichydems.blogspot.com) is mainly aimed at helping ID Democratic politicians who do more to help big corporations, the D.C. status quo and the Republicans than they help advance progressive causes -- and then helping more progressive challengers beat them in primaries. For that reason, I'm not focused on D vs. R (plenty of other sites do that), but D v D. In this case, one D (tardily or not) put his tax returns online and the other D was planning to stall for another month -- to a date that wouldn't guarantee that Pennsylvania voters would have complete information before they had to vote.
That's not good democracy, and it's the kind of thing I especially dislike in primaries, where the candidates should go out of their way to be open to their own party's constituents and courteous and fair to their fellow party members and not play hide the ball or go on the attack. So I started the "tax fax."
Should the mainstream media focus more on the larger race? Sure. Should I do a similar campaign about McCain's returns? Maybe. But all I was trying to do here, and in my question to Wolfson, was balance things out in this primary.
Oh -- and the only slam on Obama in this post came from the Clinton campaign, not from me.
Does anyone besides me suspect that it's possible that the Clintons failed to file last year? In that case, they would be playing catchup and preparing the 2006 return now. Seems sloppy, I realize, but after years of preparing tax returns, I can tell you that you would be surprised at the well-educated, wealthy people who don't file on time, among them judges and attorneys. So why not ex-Presidents?
But if they did file their return, where is it? As others have pointed out, how hard is it to scan an already-prepared return and post it on the internet?
FWIW, the returns she's been withholding are 2000 through 2006. If she hasn't filed for seven years, I'd like to know!
And would it do them any more harm to admit that they hadn't filed yet than it has to not make the returns public? If they filed for an extension, admitting that they hadn't filed yet would be in their best interest. If they are simply tardy on filing and do not have an extension from the IRS, all the public attention is going to screw them as much as publicly admitting they hadn't filed yet would. So I don't see it as all that likely that they simply haven't filed yet. There is something else going on.
They probably gave it to a lawyer to look it over just in case it contains something they
did not want to be revealed. Besides, they may just do as I do, wait until April 15.
Of course they are not going to show the real thing but a doctored version, that's why it's taking so long.
My guess is that there is going to be a lot of collapsed figures and a lot of corporate veils (many layers of ownership) that will take months to figure out. And I suspect that the supplied figures will not be direct copies of the actual tax forms that were filed. And I suspect that they are busy amending their returns from past years, but the public will not be told that there were amendments. (More donations, etc.) Finally, they are busy combing through everything and carefully developing "explanations" for any controversial items.
Maybe next year, a really good tax accountant will be able to help her write off all of her campaign expenses as a total investment loss...
If she gives her's, the dirst will be in Bill's. It is taking them so long so they can change everything and file seperately. And watch - no truth will be revealed. And then, the MSM will bat around that football for months, and we will be no wiser by convention time.
Hillary is a maniputlative liar. Do we need her returns to prove that? This is just another thing she will manipulate, to make sure we don't find out what we already know! Who contributed to the library? Who did she borrow money from? Which underhanded fascist organizations did she contribute to - and which ones contributed to her?
Just with what we already know, that should be enough. Do we want another underhab=nded, selfish liar in the Whitehouse? Another person that could care less what the public thinks?
This is just more of the same game. Now, she wants to pretend she is being transparent, even though the secrecy is obvious! Clinton: "Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"
and the tooth fairy is real
You people just wait, there will be some huge fish tale about how Sen. Clinton was on her way to release the papers but ended up in a war zone with bullets and helicopter fire galore, her limo veered off the road and was soon engulfed in flames, burning up all those papers as she courageously braved 10 miles of snow, slept in cardboard boxes, assassinated the aggressors with the precision of a Navy Seal, swam back ashore and only has one flimsy sheet of partially burnt sheets of her tax returns that show all of her givings to charity. She'll have to start all over with this process and will gladly release the tax returns, but she has to get over the emotional distress first. But she's a fighter.
I think you're closer to the truth than you realize... The main thing is the brand of "liar, liar pants on fire" will be with her until she does the right thing for the party...but I'm not holding my breath on that either. My suggestion is that at some point, Hillary, Bill and Chelsea no longer need media coverage...when they get no press, it's all over. So listen up MSM - you have more POWER than you think!
"liar, liar pantsuit on fire"
From another brilliant poster on this site.
hahaha, that sounds like good material for tom tomorrow.....
That was great. Thanks.
TAX RETURNS -- NO BIG DEAL!
The only reason Senator Clinton has delayed releasing her returns is because she and President Clinton have made a lot of money. Maybe they're a little embarrassed that there's going to be some BIG figures on those returns. Nothing criminal, just a lot of cash!
Frankly, Obama had some pretty serious income as well. A couple things he shoulda maybe been a little embarrassed about in his returns, too. He want to make healthcare more affordable, but his wife makes $300,000+ as a hospital administrator. I'm not mad at her, but it's stuff like that that makes healthcare so expensive.
I'm glad we'll soon be past this whole tax thing and on to kicking some booty in Pennsylvania.
Michelle Obama's income is not even coming close to what the college deans are making and
they don't face that kind of responsibility. Geez, you must have no idea what kind of income
some people have if you oppose to $ 300,000. Take a look at the Clinton's, who get 1 million
for one speech.
I'm sure it will be more difficult to be "the voice of the working class" when you're worth $50 million dollars.
But I agree that the part they're working on hiding is (1) the actual total income (some blind trusts perhaps, with "ranges"); and (2) where it came from (though we know a lot of it was Bill getting paid $500,000 for a "talk' to a big company---access purchased, perhaps?
Funny thing about Bill is he used to be able to sound sincere in a speech. Whether faked or real, he could seem genuine, like he spoke from the heart. So its odd to see him now, berating the audience, lecturing them, posturing, saying things he doesn't mean just to (try to) get a desired outcome. He seems so...obviously manipulative now. So joyless. So angry and bitter. No charm left at all.
Is this what happens when you sell your soul to the highest bidder? It is so strange to see.
No, I think Hillary has delayed so they can black out 99% of the returns - they made millions and millions of dollars since leaving the White House and I never heard they won the lottery!
Of course here's going to be a lot of gawking, but we have to be reasonable and understand that a lot of people want to be in business with a former President. Anything short of criminal activity will be brushed off as jealousy about the amount he's made.
Care to venture a guess how much the total since the White House years will be?
Yeah and all the money was received fr
Posted March 27, 2008 | 03:19 PM (EST)