Newsman: The House Ways and Means Committee now has six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns, ending a yearlong pursuit by Democrats to dig into one of the former president’s most closely guarded personal details.
The Supreme Court declined last week to intervene after courts said the House had power to request the returns from the IRS.
Trump argued to the Supreme Court -“No Congress has ever wielded its legislative powers to demand a President’s tax returns.” He warned of the “far-reaching implications” implications of the DC Circuit’s ruling. He had argued that that the way lower courts approached the House request ran afoul of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Mazars case, concerning a subpoena that the House issued Trump’s accounting firm for his tax information.
The House committee, led by Democratic Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, had sought six years of Trump’s tax records, primarily from the time he served as president. That included records about both Trump personally and several of his corporate entities.
Neal said Wednesday that Democrats would meet as a caucus to discuss how to handle the tax returns and get legal advice on how to proceed. Such a meeting, though, hasn’t been scheduled yet, he said.
The congressman declined to say if they would release any of the returns publicly. “The next step is to have a meeting of the Democratic caucus,” he said.
During his 2016 campaign, the Trump broke with presidential election norms and refused to produce his tax returns for public review, and they remained private after he took office. In 2016, Trump released a letter from his tax attorneys that confirmed he was under audit. But the letter also said the IRS finished reviewing Trump’s taxes from 2002 through 2008. Trump did not release his tax returns from those years, even though the audits were over.
Trump’s legal team had continuously sought to keep his returns secret, and turned to the Supreme Court – composed of three of his nominees – after he lost at the lower court level.
The documents are not expected to be immediately released to the public.
