Then in early October, an employee at an IRS service center in West Virginia leaked information about Nixon’s tax returns showing that the president had only paid $792.81 in federal income taxes in 1970 and $878.03 in 1971, but reported income in excess of $200,000. Kaine is also pressing Pence on why Trump is the first presidential nominee in decades not to release his tax returns. Read more opinion SHARE THIS ARTICLE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email 
 
 Donald Trump, in an interview over the weekend, reiterated his refusal to release his tax returns until the Internal Revenue Service has completed an audit. But for the past 40 years, almost every presidential candidate has released his (or her) tax returns in advance of the general election. After his loss to John Kennedy in 1960, Nixon retreated from the public eye, moving to New York to work as a lawyer.
– Moderator Elaine Quijano did her best to keep the candidates in check at Tuesday's vice presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., and it was a night of plenty of interruptions, aggressive challenges, and spirited defenses as Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine finally met head to head, the AP reports. Some of the night's highlights: Both candidates came out of the gate ready to rumble, with each one playing the role of defender for their respective running mates. The AP notes that the "usually easygoing" Kaine went after Pence right from the get-go, to which the "unflappable" Pence did a lot of head-shaking, laughing, and lobbing accusations of a Kaine-Clinton "insult-driven campaign." Kaine did get in zingers (or what Pence at one point called an extension of the Democratic campaign's "avalanche of insults), including saying that Donald Trump "loves dictators"—"He's got like a personal Mount Rushmore: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Moammar Gadhafi, and Saddam Hussein"—and claiming that Clinton would be a "you're hired" president, while Trump would be a "you're fired" president, tapping into Trump's oft-used line from The Apprentice. Pence dismissed Kaine's lobs as "pre-done" lines, per ABC News. Trump's tax returns were broached, with Pence noting his running mate had faced some "pretty tough times" in the mid-'90s (including apparently taking a $1B loss in 1995), but that he worked the tax code "brilliantly" to his advantage. Kaine, however, said Trump should release his tax returns, audit or no audit, noting the GOP nominee should at least meet the "Nixon standard," per CNN. (Nixon tried to keep his tax records from the public for similar auditing reasons in 1973.) Russian President Vladimir Putin also entered the conversation, with Kaine accusing Trump of calling Putin a better leader than President Obama, and Pence deflecting those accusations. "Putin's run his economy into the ground, he persecutes LGBT folks and journalists," Kaine said, per the Los Angeles Times. "If you don't know the difference between dictatorship and leadership, then you have got to go back to a fifth-grade civics class."