Did Bill Clinton help his brother evade taxes?

(Image credit: Pool AFP / Getty Images)

published 7 July 2015

That's the major insinuation of a new New York Times profile on Roger Clinton, the younger brother to the former president. The article says that Bill may have helped Roger buy an $857,000 house at a time when Roger owed over $100,000 in back taxes.

While public records do not make Bill's purchase of the house "readily apparent," The Times reports that the property was bought by Calle Mayor L.L.C., a company that shares a postal box with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Further confirming the suspicion that Bill did indeed buy a house for Roger is the fact that Hillary reportedly listed an "unidentified parcel of California real estate owned by her husband," when she gave her financial disclosure while secretary of state. According to Roger, he shares ownership of the house "50-50 with Big Brother," his nickname for Bill.

Considering Roger's hefty tax debts, purchasing a house of that value "could have been problematic," tax lawyers told The Times. At the time that Calle Mayor bought the house in 2009, the Internal Revenue Service reportedly had a lien on Roger's assets because of his outstanding tax debt. If the house was purchased under the guise of concealed ownership in the hopes of not paying tax debt, a tax lawyer told The New York Times that it "could be considered tax evasion." However, if the property were openly purchased by a debtor in a repayment plan, or if someone simply bought the home and then let the debtor live in it, that would be "no problem at all." That makes Roger's claim that he "put 50 percent of the money" into the house all the more critical.