The New York Times reports:

In the three years since Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, there has been plenty of investigation into his financial history — especially because he broke with tradition and declined to release his tax returns.

In 2016, David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times obtained his 1995 tax returns, showing that he could have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades. And for their article on Wednesday’s front page, they worked together for more than a year to investigate the wealth that the president inherited from his father.

“It’s unusual to dive into what you think is an extremely well-covered subject and to find so much completely new stuff, stuff that just is astonishing,” Mr. Barstow said. “It’s a great reminder that even things that you think are well described, there are these other deeper layers.”

Over all, the effort was sprawling and multilayered, involving more than 100,000 pages of documents, both public and confidential; interviews with key sources and requests through the Freedom of Information Act. Together, they showed that the president participated in dubious tax schemes in the 1990s, including outright fraud, and that he wasn’t the self-made billionaire he has claimed to be. [Continue reading…]