The House Ways and Means Committee will release former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday morning, a source familiar confirmed to CNN.

The returns will be placed into the congressional record on Friday morning during a House pro forma session. That pro forma session will occur around 9 a.m. ET on Friday. There will also be a formal announcement Friday from the committee.

The highly anticipated release comes after the panel last week asserted that the IRS failed to properly audit the former president’s taxes while he was in office.

The committee released a report that detailed six years’ worth of the former president’s tax returns, including his claims of massive annual losses that significantly reduced his tax burden.

Chairman Richard Neal and fellow Democrats have said that the records they obtained showed that the presidential audit program failed to work as intended. Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, charged that the complete required audit of Trump’s taxes “did not occur,” as his returns were only subjected to the mandatory audit once, in 2019, after Democrats inquired.

The committee also released a supplemental report from the Joint Committee on Taxation that included details on Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020, ahead of the planned release of the returns themselves.

The release of Trump’s tax returns marks the conclusion of a nearly four-year legal battle House Democrats waged against the former president after they took control of the House in 2019.

The audit program was important to Democrats because it was the justification they used to obtain the returns in the first place – but the Democratic pursuit was also tied in part to long-held suspicions about Trump’s taxes after he bucked the norm and refused to release his returns as a candidate and while in office. (CNN)