Judge Tells Trump Accountants: Give Financial Data To Congress

Former President Donald J. Trump’s accounting firm must give Congress his tax and other financial records from his time in the White House, and for a longer period about his lease of a government-owned building for a hotel, a judge ruled on Wednesday in a long-running legal fight over a House subpoena, Charlie Savage and Nicholas Fandos reported for the New York Times.

Photo Insert: The District of Columbia Court of Appeals

But in his 53-page opinion, the judge, Amit P. Mehta of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, also ruled that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform was not entitled to other financial records covering years before Mr. Trump took office.

The panel had issued a broad request for records dating back to 2011. “In the current polarized 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 ‘aggrandize itself at the president’s expense,’” Judge 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 either side or both sides may appeal Judge Mehta’s ruling, so the case may not be resolved anytime 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 Mr. Trump’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 issued a subpoena for the records from Mazars and separately requested copies of his tax returns from the Treasury Department.

At an earlier stage of the case, Judge 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.

WEEKLY FEATURE : PAL READY TO SOAR WITH PANDEMIC