Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog reports, Justices clear the way for House committee to obtain Trump’s tax returns:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request from former President Donald Trump to block the disclosure of his tax returns to a congressional committee. The brief order clears the way for the House Committee on Ways and Means to obtain six years’ worth of federal tax returns for Trump and his companies.
The court did not explain its reasoning, and no justices noted dissent.
The order is the latest, and perhaps the final chapter in long-running litigation that began in 2019, when the Ways and Means Committee, led by Democrats, asked the IRS for Trump’s tax returns. The committee said it wants to use the records to inform potential legislation on how federal tax laws apply to a sitting president. And in requesting the recors, the committee relied on a federal law, 26 U.S.C. § 6103(f), which allows the committee to obtain “any return or return information” from the IRS, including tax returns for individual taxpayers.
This law is mandatory. There are strict sanctions for failure to comply, including removal from office, which should have applied to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, IRS Director Chuck Rettig, and to Donald Trump who ordered their failure to comply with the law (contempt of Congress). This should not have taken 3 years to resolve with those responsible not being held accountable at law.
Under the Trump administration, the Department of the Treasury refused to turn over the returns. It was not until after President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 that the Treasury Department agreed to turn them over.
Trump nonetheless asked a federal district judge to block the disclosure of the tax returns to the committee. He argued that the committee lacked a legitimate purpose for seeking the records and that the real motive behind the request was to expose Trump’s finances and gather evidence to use against him in a criminal case. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled against Trump, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld his ruling.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decision is now the controlling precedent.
Trump came to the Supreme Court on Oct. 31, asking the justices to intervene. He contended that releasing his tax returns to the committee would violate the Supreme Court’s holding in Trump v. Mazars, a 2020 case involving different requests from congressional committees seeking Trump’s financial records. In Mazars, the court held that such requests must be backed by a valid legislative purpose.
The Biden administration and the committee urged the justices to stay out of the dispute. The Supreme Court has long held, they stressed, that courts should look only at whether there is a valid legislative purpose for Congress’ request – not at what other motives may have prompted it. And if the release of Trump’s returns were delayed, the committee added, it would “leave the Committee and Congress as a whole little or no time to complete their legislative work” before the current Congress ends on Jan. 3, 2023. Moreover, the committee warned, a ruling for Trump on the merits would make it much more difficult for Congress to do its job: Congress would never be able to investigate a former president “whenever there are [generalized] allegations that the investigation was politically motivated.”
The turnover of Trump’s tax records should occur immediately so that this Congress will have time to review the tax records.
Note: The Manhattan District Attorney has had Trump’s tax records since February 2021. Manhattan prosecutor gets Trump tax records after long fight: “The Manhattan district attorney’s office enforced a subpoena on Trump’s accounting firm within hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday and now has the documents in hand[.]” The separate jurisdictions cannot share this information.
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UPDATE 11/30/22: CNN reports, “House committee receives Donald Trump’s federal tax returns from IRS”, https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/politics/house-ways-and-means-committee-now-has-donald-trumps-federal-tax-returns/index.html
The House Ways and Means Committee now has six years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns, ending a yearslong pursuit by Democrats to dig into one of the former president’s most closely guarded personal details.
“Treasury has complied with last week’s court decision,” a Treasury spokesperson told CNN on Wednesday.
The 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.