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Tax returns are like a road map to money laundering. You know the start (Russian mob kingpins), you have a general idea of the route (well-known ML tactics), but to tie the criminal case up, you need to connect both to the end (Trump crime fam and the GOP).
And then usually, you see a secondary outflow, where the money launderer (Trump org, foundation, campaign, inaug) keeps back a portion for their pay, and funnels the “laundered” bulk back to its original mobster origin through series of shell contractors, freed of ties to crime.
Both business and personal tax returns can show you how that was done. Sometimes the “pay” for the money launderer isn’t cash per se, but transactions structured to create paper losses, which don’t really “lose” him money, but look that way so he can save on taxes.
Here’s the part @realDonaldTrump surely hasn’t grasped: they already have them. Every investigative team. Almost certainly. Some path would have opened through CI. But that is not a path to evidence that can be admitted in a court of law to convict Trump and his family.
So they have to obtain the same stuff they already have, through a chain of custody path that allows an affiant to testify on stand and say “yes, this is his authentic unaltered tax return, I know bc I’m the one in charge of keeping those.”
It’s a formality. A critical formality, but a formality. And that is why the tax returns were not requested, and did not need to be, until Congress had Mueller report near in hand and was ready to move with authority. The doc request wave now is tying bows on a wrapped package.
