A federal judge has cleared the way for Congress to acquire Donald Trump’s tax returns from during much of his time in the White House.
The ruling rejected a lawsuit from the former president seeking to block the Treasury Department from handing over the records, which Mr Trump had argued would amount to political persecution.
Congress is owed “great deference” when making oversight requests, and Mr Trump was “wrong on the law,” wrote Washington DC district judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, in his decision on Tuesday.
“A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries,” the decision reads. “Even the special solicitude accorded former Presidents does not alter the outcome.”
Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, celebrated the decision as an important step towards reforming the Internal Revenue Service programme that audits presidential finances.
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“This ruling is no surprise, the law is clearly on the Committee’s side,” he wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “I am pleased that we’re now one step closer to being able to conduct more thorough oversight of the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program.”
The former president has dismissed attempts to seek his tax returns as “the greatest political witch hunt in the history of our country.”
The Independent has reached out to Mr Trump for comment.
In the meantime, Judge McFadden ordered the federal judgement not to turn over the returns for the next 14 days, while the parties in the suit work out an agreement on what to do with the records in the case of an appeal. If no agreement can be reached, Mr Trump could challenge the decision to turn over his taxes in federal appeals court.
Congressional investigators have been seeking the returns since 2019, when their initial requests were denied by the Trump Treasury Department.
At the time, investigators explained their request as necessary to investigate the president’s foreign business dealings, as well as whether he personally benefited from the 2017 tax cut he and Republicans ushered through Congress.
“The American people deserve to know that their elected officials are acting in the public’s best interest, not their own self-interest,” Dan Kildee, a congressman from Michigan involved in the oversight effort, said at the time. “The president is the only person who can sign bills into law, and the public deserves to know whether the president’s personal financial interests affect his public decision-making.”
The records at issue stretch from 2015 to 2018, capturing the former president’s finances from before and during his time in the White House. The House committee initially wanted tax returns beginning in 2013.
Donald Trump broke with four decades of informal precedent and didn’t release his tax returns during his runs for president, claiming an ongoing audit prevented him from doing so. (The IRS has clarified that Mr Trump could still release his returns even if he was under audit.)
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After a lengthy legal fight, New York prosecutors were able to obtain his tax returns earlier this year as part of a sprawling fraud investigation of the Trump Organization, after a US Supreme Court decision in February.
Media outlets like The New York Times have also obtained portions of the former president’s finances, indicating Mr Trump regularly paid no income tax, and has hundreds of millions of dollars in personally guaranteed loans coming due in the next few years.