G&M

The House Ways and Means Committee has statutory authority to examine any tax return it wishes. This law grew out of the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal when a corrupt White House kept certain individuals entirely away from congressional scrutiny.

Flash forward to nearly a century later and Donald Trump is fighting tooth and nail to keep his tax returns out of the hands of the Ways and Means Committee, the law not withstanding (details here and here). He essentially is trying to re-litigate Teapot Dome to protect his returns.

That leaves one to wonder what he's hiding. He repeatedly promised in the past to release his returns to the public, something he has never done. But now he doesn't even want a few dozen people on a Congressional committee and staff seeing them.

I suspect he fears the committee will match those returns against some of his loan package requests that included what he alleged were tax returns but with doctored numbers.

In other words, Trump's tax returns could reveal he committed substantial loan fraud by supplying bogus tax returns as documentation, a not uncommon borrower's trick. Except it happens to be a felony.