maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most
likely declare it improper if he were audited.
Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a
practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.
Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly
pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at
the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.
Graphic Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of
Mr. Trump managed to save millions in American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits on Mr. Trump personal taxes by borrowing — then losing
_ aiher anale’s eney for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money
investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City.
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