According to a new report Thursday morning, President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, the Democratic presidential nominee, took tax deductions for computer maintenance expenses that match up closely with payments they made to her personal email server technician, Bryan Pagliano.
Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller reports that in FBI interview notes released during the “document dump” last Friday, Pagliano received payments of $5,000 and $8,350.83 from the Clintons for work and expenses related to maintenance on the server in 2009 and 2011. Their tax filings show they deducted “similar amounts” from President Clinton’s income from speeches in those same years.
Ross also noted the Clintons took additional deductions for equipment depreciation in 2011, and at other times that correlate with known changes to the server from the FBI’s timeline. This is all relevant because those deductions can only be taken for equipment used for in-home business expenses—destroying Hillary Clinton’s assertion that her private server was only for “personal emails.”
Ross explains:
The similarities in the deductions and server payments are not definitive proof that the Clintons wrote off the money they paid to Pagliano. But none of the available evidence rules it out.
Notably, the tax deductions are larger than the payments to Pagliano. If the inverse was true—if the tax deductions were smaller than the payments to Pagliano—that would suggest that the deductions were for something other than the payments to the technician. The Clintons and Pagliano could help settle the matter, but they did not respond to requests for comment.
The IRS does not allow taxpayers to deduct personal expenses, and Clinton treated the private email server as a personal device. She declined to tell the State Department she used it, and she kept it at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
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