(04-15-2019 12:04 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(04-15-2019 11:14 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(04-15-2019 10:32 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  And while I agree with both of the general statements you've made, you aren't actually discussing what Sanders said. Sanders was quite clear - she felt that Congress lacked the intellect, not the training, to understand the issues.

Sanders said, "Not smart enough." That could be either intellect or training. I don't see that she is clearly saying that they lack the intellect.
What they don't lack is the inherent inclination to find any molehill they can in those returns and try to make it into a mountain. I would question their integrity far more than I would question either their intellect or their training.

How many gallons of water do you want to carry for them?
She is clearly not saying they lack training. If you were talking to a client who asked you to provide Joe as an expert witness on an IP dispute, just Joe has no IP experience, would you tell them Joe wasn’t smart enough for the job? Or would you say Joe doesn’t have experience, expertise, etc.?

I'd say Joe wasn't smart enough about the subject matter for the job. People can be--and are--very bright, but lack specific subject matter knowledge. So with respect to the subject matter, they are not smart enough.

Not smart enough can be stupid (lack intellectual capacity) or ignorant (know nothing about the subject matter). I'm not carrying water for anyone, beyond questioning your assertion that her comment automatically meant lack of intellect rather than lack of knowledge. That's just not clear from me.

But this is the point I've been making from the beginning. Unless you are very familiar with how complex tax returns work, you lack the knowledge to interpret properly what information they contain. If you are very familiar with how such returns work, then you already know that such returns are extremely unlikely to contain any information responsive to the supposed reasons for asking for them.

All you are apt to see on Trump's 1040 are single-number entries from K-1s for various S Corps, partnerships, and LLCs through which the Trump organization conducts business. To learn anything about details behind those numbers, you would need to obtain those S Corp, partnership, and LLC returns. And those are not releasable by law without the consent of all shareholders, partners, and/or members. Unless you can establish probable cause, the IRS can't do it and Trump himself can't do it. Plus, as someone pointed out, these returns are all subject to audit by the IRS, and by law a president's returns must be audited. Exactly what do a bunch of congress critters expect to turn up that was not previously noted by a bevy of highly trained and qualified IRS agents looking for precisely the kinds of things being alleged?

If you really want to know the answers to the questions that the tax returns will supposedly answer, you should know that the far better information source would be his personal financial statements. But none of them are asking for that, just tax returns. I can think of two reasons: One, none of them want to to disclose the same things about themselves, just the fill-in-the-blank standard reporting forms that are required by law. Two, this isn't about a review for wrongdoing, but rather just and excuse to go on a fishing trip to find molehills that can be turned into mountains.

So yes, I would say that anyone who is asking for tax returns for the purpose of discovering some alleged connection to "the Russians" or some other alleged wrongdoing lacks sufficient subject matter knowledge to be "smart enough" to know what he/she was looking at.