TR*MP'S TAXES

19 April 2017

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher,

101 Main Street #380

Huntington Beach, CA 92648

Dear Congressman,

Re: Tax Day

I wonder how you celebrated Tax Day yesterday? Filing your taxes? I did mine a couple of weeks ago, and paid up my fair share. I hope you did the same.

And yes, Saturday, I joined one of the hundreds of “Tax Marches” across the country, demanding that the president* finally release his long-withheld returns. Given the small size of the community, we had an amazing turnout in Laguna Beach. The crowd stretched all along the main beach front, for the most part a dozen or so deep. By my reckoning, if there was a turnout in other cities proportionate to the size of the community, there must have been millions of us out there on the streets. And the president’s people have been telling us that no one besides the media is interested!

We are interested, Congressman. We were not negligible in numbers, nor paid to be there, as the president offensively suggested. We want to know how much he has paid over the years, and how much he has managed to avoid paying. We want to know about potential conflicts between his role as president and his business interests. We want to know what he owes, and to whom. We want to know if he might be obligated, financially, to that foreign power that meddled on his behalf in our election. We want to know the truth about the philanthropy about which he boasts, in relation to his vaunted wealth and income.

And this is not just idle curiosity. These are very basic matters, affecting the trust in which we need to hold the leader of our country. They are matters that cannot but affect the decisions that he makes—decisions that have lasting resonance not only in this country but throughout the world. Given his established record of lies, deceptions and hyperbole, that trust is already severely eroded, if not non-existent.

We have inherited a system of government that relies on “checks and balances.” I believe it to be the responsibility of elected representatives to hold the president accountable to the American people; and I ask you to join me—and so many of your constituents—in demanding the immediate release of information that affects the business of this country.

Respectfully,

Peter Clothier, Ph.D.