Jeb Bush releases 33 years of tax returns

DES MOINES, Iowa – Jeb Bush released a third of a century of his personal income tax returns on Tuesday, a record disclosure for presidential candidates.

The returns Bush posted online included the eight years since he left office as Florida governor, a period during which he served on numerous corporate boards and saw his income rise sharply. Also Tuesday, Bush’s campaign was releasing a full list of his paid speeches since 2007.

Presidential contenders are required to file financial disclosure forms within 30 days of announcing their candidacy. Bush has yet to release his and has requested a 45-day extension to do so.

But those records reflect only sources of income, transactions, assets and liabilities, and the same information for their spouses. The figures are also categorized in ranges, such as $5 million to $25 million.

Tax returns are much more detailed, and it has become customary in the past several decades for presidential candidates to make them public.

“At this point, it’s a political requirement, if not a legal one,” said Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project, a group that has collected tax forms for presidents and top presidential candidates since 1995.

No other candidate has released as many returns as Bush. The closest was Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee, who released 29 years of his income tax returns. In 2004, Democratic nominee John Kerry disclosed 20 years of such records.

Bush is the first of the nearly two dozen major candidates for president in 2016 to release tax returns. But Ron Weiser, a former finance chairman at the Republican National Committee, said Bush’s actions are aimed not at his competition for the GOP nomination but at Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“What Bush reports having made is likely much less than what Hillary Clinton has made, and she’s portraying herself as for the little guy,” Weiser said.

The Clintons had earnings exceeding $30 million combined in speaking fees and book royalties since January 2014, according to the personal financial disclosure Hillary Clinton filed in May. The report showed the couple amassed more than $25 million in speaking fees and Hillary Clinton earned more than $5 million from her 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices.”

The earnings put the couple in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of all Americans.

Bush’s rivals did not indicate when their tax returns might be made public. Marco Rubio’s team, for one, said his returns will come out but declined to say when.

Bush’s returns were likely to show how his net worth increased dramatically after he completed two terms as Florida governor in 2007.

He left office less wealthy than when elected in 1998. The decline in his net worth, from $2 million in 1998 to less than $1.3 million in early 2007, came largely from a diminished investment portfolio, according to previously released financial disclosures.

Bush also earned less as governor – $129,000 his last year in office – than he did in the private sector, where he had been paid $755,000 annually by a development company in Coral Gables, Florida, before taking office.

Since leaving the public sector, Bush has served on the boards or as an adviser to at least 15 companies and nonprofits, earning at least $3.9 million from four companies alone since 2007. His tax returns are likely to fill in details from his service on the boards.

Bush previously released some tax returns when he ran for Florida governor, so the batch of 33 will include some already made public.