Former President Donald Trump has lashed at the “outrageous abuse of power” committed by the “radical Democrat Congress” who he claims “illegally obtained and leaked” his personal tax returns.
The House Ways & Means Committee obtained Mr Trump’s tax returns after a lengthy legal process through the courts and voted this week to release them.
It is expected that they will be made public next week.
In a three-minute video posted to Truth Social on Friday, the former president claimed “the seizure of these records was totally unconstitutional” and argued that there is “no legitimate legislative purpose for their action”.
“It is yet another deranged political witch hunt that has been going on since the day I came down the escalator in Trump Tower,” he said.
He argued that the tax returns simultaneously contain relatively little information and are also very complex.
Mr Trump continued by saying that the precedent established by the action must now be applied to President Joe Biden by the new Republican House that will take power on 3 January 2023.
The former president wants the GOP to obtain the financial records of Mr Biden and his “entire criminal enterprise”.
“Biden is a corrupt politican who has spent years selling out America all over the world, including to Communist China, just take a look at his accounts, take a look at all of his homes, and take a look at what his son Hunter has contributed to the family,” Mr Trump says in the video.
He wants to know how Mr Biden, on the salary of a US Senator, was able to “buy one mansion after another”.
Mr Trump closed out the video with a quick reference to the fact that he is running for the presidency again in 2024.
The Ways & Means Committee discovered as part of its probe into the former president’s taxes that the IRS, which audits the taxes of presidents while they are in office, had failed to do so for Mr Trump for two years and only began to do so when it was asked of them.
Both Mr Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama and successor Mr Biden have been audited by the IRS each year they occupied the Oval Office.
The former president is smarting from another terrible week. In addition to the vote to make his tax returns public, the January 6 select committee eviscerated him for his role in the Capitol riot.
The panel’s conclusion was that he was solely responsible for the events of 6 January 2021 and made a subsequent criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
They also called for him to be banned from pursuing public office again.
