Fox contributor defends Trump: We don't know if there's any malfeasance in his tax returns because we haven't seen them
Katie Pavlich: “The accusation has been that President Trump is not releasing his tax returns, simply because he is hiding something. We don't actually know that, because we have not seen them.”
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From the July 9, 2020, edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom
SANDRA SMITH (CO-ANCHOR): Because this involves two cases obviously, Donna, our guidance is that — pertaining to the congressional and state grand jury subpoenas — that we could get one decision, one ruling could come down, and then the other could follow. And it's important to remind everybody that because there's two rulings, and all this is happening online due to the coronavirus and they'll be issued online, etc., that there could be two competing outcomes here. Right, Donna? You could get the president prevailing on one case, but not the other.
DONNA BRAZILE (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): That's because there were three cases, and two were consolidated. The congressional oversight cases were consolidated, and of course we have the New York case. And the president lost at the lower court level on the New York cases. I'm not a lawyer, that's why got Judge [Andrew] Napolitano on standby. But what — the other thing is at stake is congressional oversight. I mean, Congress is a co-equal branch of government. And the fact is that when you fail to produce those documents to Congress, and they cannot proceed with the proper oversight, you also stymie their ability to get the job done. So we could have two results in terms of the financial records of the president, but really I think it leads to one thing — and that is no one is above the law, and the president should be held accountable. He cannot use his blanket presidential power of immunity to say that he should be shielded while in office, when his abuses may have taken place before he landed in the White House.
SMITH: Katie, get your reaction to that as —
KATIE PAVLICH (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Well —
SMITH: Yep, go ahead.
KATIE PAVLICH: Well, Donna says abuses that may have happened before he took office. Now, that's an assumption that we don't have evidence for —
BRAZILE: Hush money. That's the hush money.
PAVLICH: The accusation has been that President Trump is not releasing his tax returns, simply because he is hiding something. We don't actually know that, because we have not seen them. But the issue is, yes, it's about congressional oversight. But much of the argument is why Congress and Democrats, who've been pursuing the president's financial records, are asking for them. Is it really about oversight and protecting the American people from conflicts of interest? Or is it because Democrats have political axes to grind? They've done everything from accusing him of Russian collusion, to impeachment, to a number of other things that they've tried to do to politically harm him. So the issue, I think, is whether they're doing it on behalf of the American people, or whether they're doing it on behalf of politics — which in an election year, of course that is amplified a whole lot.