4/4/2008

Clinton releases long-awaited tax returns

Bill and Hillary Clinton - as was promised last month after much prodding by Barack Obama - have released their federal income tax returns:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Clinton report nearly $109.2 million in income for seven years in newly released tax data.

The Democratic presidential candidate and her husband paid $33.8 million in taxes from 2000 through 2007. They listed $10.25 million in charitable contributions during that period.

Clinton has been under pressure to release her tax returns, especially from rival Barack Obama, who posted his 2000 to 2006 returns on his campaign Web site last week. Neither Obama nor Republican Sen. John McCain have made their 2007 tax returns public, though both say they will this month.

You can download the returns here.

Here is the breakdown provided by Clinton of the family income:

2000-2007 Returns
CUMULATIVE TOTAL(GROSS) INCOME: $109,175,175

Including, among other items:

Senator Clinton's Senate Salary: $1,051,606

President Clinton's Presidential Pension: $1,217,250

Senator Clinton's Book Income: $10,457,083

President Clinton's Book Income: $29,580,525

President Clinton's Speech Income: $51,855,599

Now, for all of you non-MIT mathematicians out there, those salary totals provided total approximately $93.9 million dollars. This means that roughly $15 million in income falls into that "other items" category. There will much stewing over this, to be sure.

Also, in quite a coup for the best know internet news hound, hyper-critic of Clinton Matt Drudge was the first to receive the scoop. Politico's Ben Smith has a good, pithy summation of this move:

The returns went early to Drudge - who has been extremely hard on Hillary for months - as good proof as any since the time of Machiavelli that it's better to be feared than loved.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Clintons opted to release this information at around 4pm on a Friday. While President, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the Friday news dump, and for obvious reasons. The logic is simple: when you have bad or questionable information to release to the public, you do so on Friday at the close of the week, preferably as late in the day as possible. This provides for a long, distracting weekend for the majority of people (e.g. the non-inside politics types) to hear little to nothing about the story before the more serious work-week news cycle gets their hands on it on Monday.

It's a strategy that Barack Obama is also very familiar with. You'll remember that recently, in the heat of the Rev. Wright kerfuffle, Obama consented to long-requested sit-down interviews with the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times on Tony Rezko. He did those interviews on Friday, March 16th.


UPDATE: April 5, 2008 - 11:50am
The aforementioned unaccounted for millions is contained the details of the individual returns. Have fun plying through them.

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Filed Under: Race for President

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