Donald Trump Jr. Monday hammered The New York Times for its weekend article detailing his father’s financial practices and tax payments and said the general public doesn’t “understand what goes into a business.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Trump Jr. told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” about the Times’ expose on President Donald Trump, particularly his use of tax credits and deductions, resulting in his not paying taxes for 10 of the 15 years leading up to his 2016 election.
“My father’s paid tens of millions of taxes,” Trump Jr. added. “If he does things in certain years where you get depreciation, where you get the write-off, where you get historical tax credits like we did when we took on the risk of building the Old Post Office in D.C., it’s the perfect example.”
That project was a government contract done under the Obama administration, said Trump Jr. of the Washington hotel project.
“We bid against every hotel company in the world, historical tax credits that you use to offset tax payments for taking the risk to build that,” said Trump Jr. “It literally took an act of Congress to get it done. So with that comes historical tax credits. That’s the reality.”
What goes into a business, he added, “doesn’t include property taxes. It doesn’t include payroll taxes. It doesn’t include real estate taxes. It doesn’t include some of the things that he has been paying taxes on forever as he is also putting thousands and thousands of people to work on an annual basis.”
He further accused the newspaper of putting out the story to give Democrat nominee Joe Biden ammunition for Tuesday night’s debate.
“We saw it two weeks ago with the debunked claim about the military,” Trump Jr. said. “We have seen it four years ago about the Russia hoax. If only they spent as much time looking for maybe, I don’t know, Hunter Biden’s tax returns and the Biden crime family issues where Hunter is taking money from a known associate of Vladimir Putin, $3.5 million.”
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