Donald Trump's business losses in 1995 were so large that they could have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years, according to records obtained by The New York Times.
In a story published online late on Saturday, the Times said it anonymously received the first pages of Trump's 1995 state income tax filings in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The filings show a net loss of $US915,729,293 in federal taxable income for the year.
That Trump was losing money during the early to mid-1990s was already well established.
But the records obtained by the Times show losses of such a magnitude that they potentially allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes for years, possibly until the end of the last decade.
Trump's campaign released a statement on Saturday lashing out at the Times for publishing the records and accused the newspaper of working to benefit the Republican nominee's presidential rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"The New York Times, like establishment media in general, is an extension of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic Party and their global special interests," the campaign said, calling Trump "a highly skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required".
The statement added that Trump had paid "hundreds of millions" of dollars in other kinds of taxes over the years.
The news in Sunday's New York Times on ended a disastrous week for the Republican presidential candidate, focusing renewed attention his steadfast refusal to release his income tax returns.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a key Trump surrogate on the campaign trail, called the revelations proof of the New York tycoon's "absolute genius."
"You have an obligation when you run a business to maximize the profits and if there is a tax law that says I can deduct this, you deduct it," Giuliani told ABC News, suggesting investors in Trump's company probably would have sued him had he done otherwise.
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton's vanquished Democratic presidential primary foe who now supports her, took the opposite view.
"If everybody in this country was a 'genius'," he told ABC, "we would not have a country," the Vermont senator said.
