Sarah Sanders: Congress not ‘smart enough’ to look through Trump’s taxes

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday that she doesn’t think members of Congress are “smart enough” to look through President Trump’s tax returns.

“I don’t think Congress — particularly not this group of congressmen and women — are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“My guess is that most of them don’t do their own taxes, and I certainly don’t trust them to look through the decades of success that the president has and determine anything,” Sanders continued.

Chris asks @PressSec if the President will tell the IRS not to release his tax returns #FNS pic.twitter.com/RBaVniYMKj

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) April 14, 2019

{mosads}Sanders also said that Democrats are taking a “dangerous, dangerous road” in asking for Trump’s tax returns.

Earlier this month, House Democrats formally requested Trump’s tax returns. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) asked IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig to turn over six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns.

Neal on Saturday sent a second letter to Rettig, extending the deadline to turn over Trump’s taxes to April 23. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he expects Treasury to respond to Neal by that date but called the deadline “arbitrary.”

Trump, breaking with other candidates, has said he won’t release his taxes, citing an ongoing audit. 

If the House Ways and Means Committee obtains Trump’s tax returns, it could designate committee staff and staff from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation to help review the tax returns behind closed doors before the committee votes to make any of the returns public.

Naomi Jagoda contributed to this report, which was updated at 10:33 a.m.