Trump asks court to block House committee from obtaining his tax returns

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Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Pennsylvania in 2018. (Evan El-Amin via Shutterstock)

Former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block the disclosure of his federal income tax returns to a congressional committee.

Without court intervention, the House Ways and Means Committee is poised to obtain six years of tax returns for Trump and the companies he owns. Trump’s legal team told the justices that allowing the committee to obtain those records would undermine the separation of powers and violate a Supreme Court ruling in an earlier case involving a different congressional effort to obtain Trump’s tax records.

The battle began in 2019, when the Democratic-led Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed the IRS for tax returns related to Trump and his businesses. A federal law, 26 USC § 6103(f), allows the committee to obtain “any return or return information” from the IRS, including tax returns for individual taxpayers.

When the Treasury Department under the Trump administration refused to hand over the returns, the committee sued. Before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ruled on the committee’s request, President Joe Biden was elected and took office in January 2021. That prompted the committee to renew its request, this time with more information about why it wanted them. returns — specifically, as part of his review of legislation on how federal tax laws apply to a sitting president. This time, the Treasury Department said it would hand over the documents, prompting the committee to seek to dismiss its lawsuit.

Trump, who had intervened in the lawsuit, then filed his own allegations, seeking to block disclosure of his tax returns to the committee. McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled against Trump, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that decision. In an opinion by a three-judge panel that included two Republican appointees, the court ruled in August that the committee stated a valid legislative purpose for its request and is entitled to obtain the documents. The panel rejected Trump’s argument that the committee’s real motive was to expose Trump’s finances and gather evidence to use against Trump in a criminal case.

“The mere fact that individual members of Congress may have political as well as legislative motives is not moot,” Judge David Sentelle wrote for the panel.

Last week, the full D.C. Circuit declined to rehear the case, prompting Trump to go to the Supreme Court. In his emergency motion, he argued that the commission’s stated legislative goals are merely a pretext. The comments from top Democrats, such as committee chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., “demonstrate an entirely different purpose: exposing President Trump’s tax information to the public for the sake of exposure,” Trump’s legal team wrote.

Allowing the committee to obtain the information would violate the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling Trump vs. The Mazars, a case involving special requests from congressional committees seeking Trump’s financial records. IN The Mazars, the court ruled that such claims must be supported by valid legislative intent and sent the dispute back to the lower courts. Trump’s former accounting firm recently began turning over some of the documents at issue in that lawsuit to Congress.

This article was originally published in Howe on the Court.