Honorable President Barack Obama:

FORTHE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, we hereby petition you to order termination of all “routine”audits of every federal income tax return filed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, either personally or else for entities controlled by him directly or through his family, WITH PREJUDICE, if returns filed since 1995, heretofore withheld, are simply released before he swears the oath required to become our president: in order to afford him, thereby, a ready opportunity to enhance his standing by merely keeping his explicit promise to disclose fully.

Mr. Trump constantly piled one commitment onto another, throughout 2015 and 2016, to provide a complete release of his federal tax information to his fellow Americans, as soon as any-and-all “routine”audits could be finished, and he repeatedly expressed zeal for open-kimono revelations.

Mr. Trump did somewhat modify verbiage utilized to set his terms for releasing tax documents – as competitors for both major-party nominations have long done – from his statement to Bret Baier, on Fox television, shortly before his candidacy was formalized: “I want to tell you, right now, I have no problem with giving my tax returns, but I would tell you, upfront, a stupid person, a really stupid person, is paying a lot of taxes.” However, the changes only reinforced his core promise.

For example, on February 25, 2016, at a Republican Primary Debate held in Houston, Mr. Trump squarely indicated to Hugh Hewitt: “I want to release my tax returns, but I can’t release it while I’m under an audit. We’re under a routine audit; I’ve had it for years; I get audited and, obviously, if I’m being audited, I’m not going to release a return. As soon as the audit is done, I love it.”

Then, on May 8, 2016, Mr. Trump focused and fortified his ardor in Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press interview: “I would love to give the tax returns, but I can’t do it until I’m finished with the audit.”

Internal Democratic National Committee email – reportedly stolen by Russian government agents in order to manipulate the outcome of our American presidential election, on November 8, 2016, according to multiple national security agencies of the United States, and certainly placed online, at https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12349#, in order to harm that party’s nominee – cites further verbal formulae used by Mr. Trump to state, and to restate, his promise of full disclosure.

Whether unduly long delays in final resolution of all “routine”audits of federal tax filings by Mr. Trump, personally and for his literally hundreds of interrelated commercial operations, have been due to bureaucratic bad faith, government incompetence or still worse (as many of his supporters patently believe), or due to tactics exploited by his own tax accountants and tax lawyers to delay exposure of damaging federal tax information until after the General Election (as a variety of his detractors loudly insist), no honest person can dispute that every American has been squarely promised access to his sworn tax returns; that millions of your fellow citizens perceive a rising urgency as to the People’s need to be able to assess his complicated business-and-family finances, including nonsalacious fiscal items in BuzzFeed News’ unvetted WikiLeaks-like dump on January 10, 2017; and that YOU alone can assist him to honor his endless pledges to release his tax filings publicly, for nearly two years, and, yet more pivotally, to so demonstrate his TRUTHFULNESS, since the requested termination of every “routine”audit would be impeachable if ordered by him!

Thus, you should cut a Gordian Tax Knot now looping a clear promise into an effective cover-up, since any “routine” audit left unresolved guarantees four years of mounting distrust, and since Mr. Trump’s chief of staff urged YOU to lead a national healing on multiple networks on January 15th.

Most Americans definitely recognize the utility of public confidence based on reasonably well-informed understanding – several decades after President Ronald Reagan built successful “trust but verify” methods on the old Russian proverb “Доверяй но проверяй” – and thus must value Mr. Trump’s oft-pledged disclosure of information necessary and sufficient to judge growing concerns over several matters that have developed, or intensified, since presidential balloting, as well as to ascertain, more crucially, if numerous vows to supply his long withheld tax materials, after each“routine”audit ends, were TRUTHFUL when made, remade and then remade time and again (first by Mr. Trump and later by his self-selected Vice President-elect Michael R. Pence).

In addition to this sine qua non TRUTH TELLING question of paramount importance, today, federal tax filings by Mr. Trump over the last two decades would, of course, yield the fullest-and-most-reliable documentation available, as sworn on his oath, to analyze his global operations’ rather byzantine finances, including whether he, or any of his several hundred interrelated businesses, is economically beholden, in fiscal reality, to the Russian Federation, to its President Vladimir Putin or to oligarchs answerable to that authoritarian (given all continuing excuses, ongoing flattery and stubbornly unrelenting praise for a hostile dictator, even after the United States imposed sanctions against Russia on December 29, 2016 for its Soviet-style espionage to alter the electoral results of our country’s presidential contest, in 2016, and to UNDERMINE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY ITSELF,thereby, and notwithstanding thus unusually broad support among elected officials, in both major political parties, for those and stronger penalties; given his dismissive brush-off of the Presidential Daily Brief, since the General Election, due to his regularly self-expressed belief that his intelligence is greater than experts in international affairs; and given his egregious belittling of multiple national security agencies’ jointly verified detections of cyberattacks by Russia, as central acts of modern warfare, including his recent New Year’s Eve averments that he knows “lots about hacking,” generally, and that “I also know things that other people don’t know,” specifically), and whether he could eliminate fatally compromising financial conflicts-of-interest with any modality other than either authentically independent management for, or else total divestitures of, his many worldwide commercial interests to resolve all appearances of self-dealing and actual invitations for threats to his family’s wealth (given abrupt cancellation of a critical news conference that his staff had scheduled for December 15, 2016 to outline his plans to maintain familial control, and given a refusal at that press briefing, rescheduled to January 11, 2017, to release any tax filing), inter alia.

The stakes for the United States could not be higher, especially after political sabotage of the 44th presidency, over eight years, initially by cynical party-first officeholders so intent on destruction of the current administration that colossal America-be-damned consequences resulting have been irresponsibly disregarded throughout four congresses, and subsequently by highly partisan agents provocateurs advancing falsehoods as to our president’s standard-form Hawaiian birth certificate, ginning up a truly despicable blood libel that our twice-elected commander-in-chief is “the founder of ISIS” and tweeting out a soup-to-nuts mix of irregular assertions at least as phantasmagorical.

Thus, YOU owe your successor one last chance NOT to harm the position further with a cover-up.

Plainly, few circumstances might deliver such a riven divide between the high road asked of you hereby – to put our country first by aiding a President-elect whose entire political career has been constructed so far on nonstop slanders of you, your legitimacy to occupy the Oval Office and even your loyalty – and that remarkably low road paved both with malice aforethought, over and over, and also with utter obliviousness for titanic injuries being thereby inflicted on these United States, and thus selfishly visited on all of your (and his shortly-to-be) constituents as fellow Americans.

But this juncture is of genuine urgency, since Mr. Trump’s middling Electoral College outcome – after receiving almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton nationally – shows not public trust in him, but a still larger voter distrust for the Democratic nominee, which in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin proved sufficient for a very small fraction of the People to generate razor-thin margins totaling only 77,744 of 13,233,376 ballots cast, there, but yielding 304-of-538 electors despite a rejection of him by the 65,844,954-to-62,979,879 count of every citizen voting.

Res ipsa loquitur: A very ugly thing speaks for itself, which cannot be spinelessly masked behind a disinformational fig leaf, including the pure fantasy that Russia’s espionage agents stole private-and-public emails; selectively handed them over to WikiLeaks to be fed out for weeks, day after day, before the General Election; but did not thereby shift 77,744 of 13,233,376 voters (a canard spouted even by some key mainstream-media personalities, when functioning as talking heads for cable news-as-entertainment, in order to reassure, even while riling, viewers who prefer to access such bread-and-circus diversions in contemporary electronic forms, and so as to evidence rigor as vacant as that of those seeking to hide a potent 800-pound gorilla in Moscow, who likely selected our next president, behind a chimera derided as a bed-lounging hacker who “weighs 400 pounds,” as iconic Congressman John Lewis has bravely called out as to delegitimacy of a process so tainted).

Such exigencies only escalate as Mr. Trump doubles down to disparage pivotal national-security agencies protecting America – without respect to which political party controls the White House – including his snide tweet on January 3, 2017: “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

Then, on January 4th, Mr. Trump singled out WikiLeaks’ founder as a source for his never-ending demeaning of national security analyses: “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’ - why was DNC so careless?” (after previously suggesting capital punishment for those associated with WikiLeaks, in 2010, then stating “I think it’s disgraceful; I think there should be like [a] death penalty or something,” as he responded to queries about that group posed to him by Brian Kilmeade for a Fox News radio interview, and before an equivocating disavowal in a two-part Twitter attack on the press early on January 5th: “The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange – wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people…” [with an addendum tagged on circa 20 minutes later: “to make up their own minds as to the truth. The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”]).

Yet, on January 6th, even after Mr. Trump had met face to face with four leaders of our country’s chief national security organizations, and even though he was then certainly told that the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency have reached unanimity as to “high confidence” for their crucial judgments that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” further that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and still further that both “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” (bolding within the declassified version of their review issued on January 6th), his post-meeting statement defiantly continued to reiterate longstanding talking points with insistence that “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election” (which dogged mantra was soon enlarged on January 7th, in an early-morning tweet, falsely claiming “absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results,” despite the exact opposite becoming ever-more obvious, and thus baldly misrepresenting that vital unclassified analysis to abet contrary-to-reality illogic).

While speculation is growing as to HOW Mr. Trump could process facts and figures to sustain his claims, at such variance with common sense, that massive Russian malevolence had “absolutely no effect” on election results – including conservative columnist David Brooks positing an ego so large that gravitational forces devolve, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham implicating mental health, even before tweet-storms conflated BuzzFeed News’ dossier-dump with CNN’s reporting, whereby his initial “FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” reply to Buzz bait, late on January 10th, rapidly progressed, early on January 11th, to verify his views by citing Russia as a source, along with Mr. Assange earlier, to conclude “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” and before then going silent until he re-identified Russia, as his source, on Friday the 13th – rational dollar realities central for terminating “routine” audits petitioned herein are simple.

Given Mr. Trump’s focused efforts to avoid federal taxation based on his stance that “I am proud of the fact, as a businessman, I want to pay as little tax as possible” – as he told Mr. Baier on April 10, 2015 – little tax revenue could be lost to the United States Treasury from termination of every audit requested hereby, and even the upper limit of any potential loss could not outweigh massive benefits from you aiding our next president to halt rising SUSPICIONS, and to evidence tangible SINCERITY, both quintessential for any leader’s capacity to help “Make America Great Again!” (à la the Reagan-Bush campaign’s “Let’s make America great again” goal, as used extensively in 1980 nationwide, through campaign buttons, television advertisements and wall posters, albeit not ever apparently stitched, printed or otherwise attached, 37 years ago, to any baseball-style caps).

Further, Mr. Trump’s vow to accept just $1 each year for all federal salary, pensions and benefits would effectively waive circa $3 million payable to him, normally, as our nation’s 45th president.

Your balanced-and-dignified responses on January 8th to leading questions put to you by George Stephanopoulos about President Putin’s success in electing President-elect Trump were laudable, given potentially compromising aspects of his inquiries, but did not resolve the core issue herein, which is about not electoral-result legalities, but how to foster actual legitimacy as far as feasible.

Please do the right thing, Mr. President, to ensure that every American citizen will thereby either receive all federal tax information long squarely pledged, but still withheld even now, or else know that you have done everything possible to protect our country by thus giving the lie to frauds as to often promised access to sworn tax filings and, most crucially, to core UNTRUTHFULNESS.

Submitted most respectfully,

Will Knedlik, citizen petitioner