Trump told to give Congress some financial records

WASHINGTON • Former US president Donald Trump's accounting firm must give Congress his tax and other financial records from his time in the White House, and information for a longer period about his lease of a government-owned building for a hotel, a judge has ruled in a long-running legal fight over a House subpoena.

But in his 53-page opinion, Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, also ruled on Wednesday that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform is not entitled to other financial records covering the years before Mr Trump took office. The panel had issued a broad request for records dating back to 2011.

"In the current polarised political climate, it is not difficult to imagine the incentives a Congress would have to threaten or influence a sitting president with a similarly robust subpoena, issued after he leaves office, in order to 'aggrandise itself at the president's expense'," Mr Mehta wrote, citing a Supreme Court ruling last year.

He added: "In the court's view, this not-insignificant risk to the institution of the presidency outweighs the committee's incremental legislative need for the material subpoenaed" from the accountants.

The split decision means that both sides may appeal against Mr Mehta's ruling, so the case may not be resolved any time soon.

But, in one respect, the stakes have been lowered: The Manhattan district attorney's office obtained similar records this year from Mr Trump's accounting firm, Mazars USA, after the Supreme Court rejected the former president's efforts to block their release.

The litigation grew out of Mr Trump's refusal, in a break with modern precedent, to make his tax returns public when he ran for president and once he was in office. After Democrats took over the House in 2019, the Oversight and Reform Committee subpoenaed Mazars for the records and separately requested copies of his tax returns from the Treasury Department.

But Mr Trump vowed to stonewall all subpoenas from House Democrats, and his personal lawyers and the Trump-era Justice Department battled the efforts in court, lodging appeals and essentially running out the clock on the exposure of his financial dealings to outside scrutiny before his loss in the 2020 election.

At an earlier stage of the case, Mr Mehta upheld the committee's entire demand as a legitimate exercise of congressional oversight power, rejecting Mr Trump's argument that it should be ruled invalid as a politically motivated effort to harass him. Mr Trump's lawyers appealed, and an appeals court in the District of Columbia upheld Mr Mehta's ruling.

NYTIMES