CNN’s Jake Tapper Busts Kellyanne Conway for Defending Trump on Tax Returns After She Demanded Them in 2016

Kellyanne Conway defended Donald Trump’s continued refusal to release his tax returns, but CNN anchor Jake Tapper busted the senior adviser by showing video of Conway demanding that very thing of Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Wednesday afternoon’s edition of CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, Tapper led his panel in a discussion of Trump’s tax returns, and in a brief aside, noted that Conway defended Trump earlier that day.

He played video of Conway telling Jim Sciutto that Trump is “under audit. If he wasn’t under audit, maybe he would release them. But he didn’t release them during the campaign, and he was elected anyway. Everybody knew that people were asking about those tax returns.”

“You know who was asking about those tax returns back in 2016?” Tapper asked, smiling wryly. “Well, Kellyanne Conway.”

He then played a clip from this April 25, 2016 edition of CNN Newsroom, in which Conway said “It’s completely transparent, Donald Trump’s tax returns aren’t. I would like to see those be transparent.”

After the clip, Tapper noted that the interview “was, of course, before she joined the campaign.”

In fact, CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Conway about the issue in August of 2016, when Conway was named Trump’s campaign manager, and Conway rolled out the audit excuse.

“OK, now you’re in charge of his campaign. Given that, given how you feel, are we going to see Donald Trump’s tax returns soon?” Bash asked.

“So, now that I am on the inside, I know something I didn’t know then, which is, he is under audit and what that means,” Conway said. “And he has said very clearly — and I back him up completely — that when the audit is completed, he will release the tax returns.”

But as Tapper noted earlier in his show, Trump has offered no proof that he is under audit, and as Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted over the weekend, an audit does not preclude Trump from releasing his returns.

Watch the clip above, via CNN.

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