[applause] >> now we are going to skip a few years and joe thorndike's gonna talk to us a little bit about the joint committee involvement with the nixon tax return. mr. thorndike: what i have to do to get my powerpoint screen back? i'll just start by saying george has better visuals that i have. i apologize for that, up front. i have found over the years that if you are talking about tax to a nontax audience or history to just about anybody, the visual aids are crucial to keep people focused. in this room, it's probably a little bit easier. i can take a presumption of interest going in. i will say, as george said, that researching tax can be difficult. any tax issue, it depends upon government documents. the national archives, quite understandably, is very skittish about releasing inadvertently taxpayer information. they have inadvertently released it to me in the past, and they get in trouble for that. it really does mean that there's kind of a curtain that comes in , drops down on a lot of tax issues and makes it very hard to research. because it is actually just impossible for the

an additional difficulty, unless joe thorndike has worked something out, is that the staff papers on the nixon investigation are off limits until 2024. and i was told that they may not be cleansed of tax return information and available to the public until 2029 at the earliest. i've always been pretty good at arithmetic and i can tell you that although joe may be here to tell you that part of the story, in the 115th anniversary, i will not. probably my biggest surprise was the completely unintended nature of the institution congress authorized in 1966. the house wanted to create a two-year tax commission, something like the tax reform panel established over a decade ago by the bush administration. in the early years, chairman green continued to refer to and treat the committee as a short-term institution, even though the enabling statute placed no time limit on its existence. all of his initial hires were temporary. and he even expressed caution about a promising applicant giving up a good permanent position at the treasury department to take what he believed to be only temporary emp

[applause] >> now we are going to skip a few years and joe thorndike's cannot talk to us a little bit about the joint committee involvement. mr. thorndike: what i have to do to get my powerpoint screen back? i'll just start by saying george has better visuals that i have. i have found over the years that if you are talking about tax to a nontax audience or history to just about anybody, the visual aids are crucial to keep people focused. in this room, it's probably a little bit easier. i can take a presumption of interest going in. i will say, as george said, that research and tax can be difficult. any tax issue, it depends upon government office -- government documents. the national archives is very skittish about releasing inadvertently taxpayer information. they have inadvertently released it to me in the past, they get in trouble for that. it really does mean that there's kind of a curtain that comes in drops down on a lot of tax issues and makes it very hard to research. because it is actually just impossible for the archives to et their files v for text their information, so a l