The Millennial Marine Behind the Campaign to Give $6 Million to Charity for Trump’s Tax Returns

Amid the more recent Donald Trump scandals—the sexual assault allegations, his repeated accusations that the election is "rigged"—casual election watchers may have forgotten that with only a few weeks before Election Day, the Republican candidate has still refused to release his tax returns. These returns would likely be complicated and long, but they would answer questions about Trump's charitable giving and how much he pays in taxes.

There has been a chorus of voices across the political spectrum calling for Trump to release his tax information, but none have been so compelling as Peter James Kiernan, a 27-year-old veteran who served in Afghanistan and was the youngest-ever member of the elite Marine Raider Regiment. Last month, Kiernan started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to be donated to veterans groups if Trump makes his returns public. It's since brought in more than $6 million—including $5 million from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that will kick in if Trump releases the info before Wednesday's debate.

With that deadline fast approaching, I spoke to Kiernan about his career in the Marines, what inspired his campaign, and what his fellow veterans think of the election.

VICE: Your campaign has made headlines, but your personal story is less well-known. Let's start from the beginning: Why did you originally decide to enlist?
Peter James Kiernan: I think there are always a lot of reasons why someone decides to serve, but for me, I was pretty intimately affected by 9/11. On that day, 42 people from my hometown were killed. Even my uncle, he actually worked in the World Trade Center, and the only reason he's alive today is because he was outside on a smoke break.

I was 11 at the time, so I was still pretty young, but watching all the funerals following 9/11 really galvanized my commitment to public service. Then in high school, when I started thinking for myself [ laughs], I first heard the quote: "The society that makes a distinction between its warriors and its scholars will have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." That really resonated with me, especially as someone from a really conservative area where people were super supportive of our wars—even when they weren't going well—yet very few actually stepped up to serve. So when I graduated from high school, I enlisted in the Marine Corps.

You quickly ascended to the highly selective Marine Special Operations Command, became a scout sniper, free-fall qualified, and a fluent speaker of Pashto, which you used during your deployment in Afghanistan…
Being so young and given that much responsibility was just incredible. When I was 19 years old, I was responsible for $4.5 million of equipment, and by the time I was 22, I was leading 30 men on the battlefield. It's that kind of exponential development that doesn't happen anywhere else. Out of most of my six years, I spent a good majority of that in military schools, learning different skills, doing all sorts of things. So that's why I speak Pashto, I got to be a scout sniper, I got to jump out of planes, all those different things were really just because I was fortunate to be in this community, and why I try to give back to this community now as a veteran.

So turning to your campaign: Why'd you launch this effort?
I attended the Commander-in-Chief Forum on the Intrepid, the forum where both Secretary Clinton and then Mr. Trump answered questions for about a half hour on foreign policy, military, and veterans affairs. It was very apparent that the candidates were not being treated equally: Secretary Clinton took daggers for ten minutes about her emails, and Mr. Trump only got softballs. Clinton's released like 40 years of tax returns, Mr. Kaine's released ten years, Mr. Pence has released ten years, and yet, the fact that Trump hasn't released his tax returns seems to be like an asterisk, it's not even a serious question in the media.

The forum frustrated me because I'm genuinely concerned about the tax returns issue as it relates to national security. I think that if you have any conflicts of interest, which is the biggest issue for me and for national security, it can be exploited by your adversaries or influence your decisions. For example just theoretically, if you owe $100 million to China, let's say, there could be an incentive to go to war to erase that debt. In Afghanistan for example, we exploited our adversaries' conflicts of interest deliberately as a tactic all the time. I've seen how this works, and it works really, really well.

So for me, the fact that he didn't get asked about his taxes in a national security forum was insane. I started this campaign out of frustration with Mr. Trump, his campaign, and just to hold him accountable. He said he'd release these tax returns for months now, he still hasn't done it, and the American people have the right to review these factors so it could be discussed at least in the final debate.

Your campaign really exploded when LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman pledged $5 million to your CrowdPac. How did that happen?
On the day I launched the CrowdPac, I happened to be on Rachel Maddow—not for our campaign—but was tweeting about it. And yeah, the founder of LinkedIn found it and then pledged $5 million and totally raised the profile of the project.

We were at probably under $10k, and then after he pledged, we raised $100k in 24 hours. Since then, over three weeks, we are averaging about $20k per day. So we've raised a ton of money for these veterans organizations and completely passed that initial $25k goal. It's been incredible.

Both candidates have been making overtures to the veterans' community. What's been your reaction to the discourse on these issues throughout the 2016 election cycle?
As far as putting concrete details on how each candidate is going to help veterans, the Clinton campaign far exceeds Mr. Trump's, certainly based off their policy platforms. Too often veterans get used as props in political battles because they're a small, little demographic, and it's easy for politicians to play with us.

But the thing that annoys me most was when Mr. Trump used veterans when he dipped out of the last Republican [primary] debate. He said it was more important to raise money for veterans than it was to attend the debate. This was just political convenience; it wasn't because he actually cared. And we know this now because it wasn't until four months later when David Fahrenthold [of the Washington Post] challenged Mr. Trump about his donation that we discovered he hadn't donated. He hadn't even pledged this supposed $1 million of his own money.

At this point, we've raised $6.2 million. That's more money than he raised by skipping his debate, and all he has to do is release his tax returns. He claimed he'd come out for veterans when it benefitted him, but what does he do when it really matters?

I've talked to you before about partisanship in the military, and you once said you felt a lot of Democratic views were taboo among your former comrades. You've run this as an independent voter, but of course, it's a challenge to the country's Republican nominee. What's been the reaction from your community?
Thankfully, it's been overwhelmingly supportive. I anticipated getting blackballed, but that really hasn't been the case. Most have been super supportive and excited that the campaign's raised so much money and attention for these veterans organizations.

While you still see kind of a rampant hatred for Secretary Clinton among veterans, you don't see a lot of support for Mr. Trump—most people see him as an asshole or an idiot, or both.

In this election, it seems like people aren't definitively Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal; we're really seeing mostly personal politics, politics of personality. So I think people support our campaign because it's benefiting veterans by challenging Trump to just have some integrity, to just stand by his word, and at the same time, it's not endorsing Secretary Clinton. And I think that's the line most of my buddies have come down on.

Anna Therese Day is an award-winning independent journalist. Follow her work in the field on Twitter and Instagram at @ATDLive and on Facebook.