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A federal appeals court ruled Friday that House lawmakers can see years of former Donald Trump’s financial accounting records, but narrowed the range of documents Trump has to deliver in a long legal battle for its compliance with presidential ethics and outreach laws.
The fight is not over: both parties can still appeal the three-judge court’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit or to the Supreme Court. But the decision marked a partial victory for each side over a subpoena issued in 2019 by the House Oversight Committee to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA.
“We defend the Committee’s authority to cite some of President Trump’s financial records to further the Committee’s listed legislative purposes,” circuit chief judge Sri Srinivasan wrote. “But we cannot maintain the breadth of the Committee’s citation.”
The panel was reviewing a case that the U.S. Supreme Court returned to lower courts for further proceedings in July 2020.
In a complex, nuanced 67-page opinion, Srinivasan interpreted how to apply the Supreme Court directive to “insist on a non-broad citation of what is reasonably necessary to support the legislative purpose of Congress.” The case is about an unprecedented struggle over the extent to which Congress can go so far as to investigate the alleged corruption of the nation’s chief executive and what protections former presidents retain from legislators ’investigations after leaving office under the separation of powers from the Constitution.
Trump, who lost re-election in 2020 and is likely preparing another candidacy for the White House in 2024, was the party’s first major candidate in decades to refuse to release his tax returns, publicly criticizing the ‘Internal Revenue Service to audit it. Trump refused to divest his business stakes and, while in office, oversaw the government leasing agency of his Washington flagship hotel, even though his companies received millions from both the federal government and foreign powers. .
In response, Congressional Democrats launched several efforts to investigate his finances, which Trump repressed. The House Oversight Committee demanded from Mazars a wealth of information about Trump and his business entities over an eight-year period from 2011 to 2018, saying his presidency exposed weaknesses in oversight that only they could be solved with the information. The committee said it sought documents to corroborate the testimony of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that Trump artificially inflated and deflated the value of his assets for personal gain.
Trump filed a lawsuit in May 2019 to block the release, arguing that he enjoyed absolute immunity from legislative consultations and that House Democrats only wanted to expose his data for political gain.
In another case still pending appeal, Trump also opposed a request from the House Media and Ways Committee to see six years of his federal tax records. After Trump left office, President Biden’s Treasury Department agreed that records should be disclosed, and a federal judge appointed by Trump agreed last December. Trump has continued to fight liberation as a private citizen.
Judges of Friday’s ruling – Srinivasan and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Judith W. Rogers – asked during oral arguments late last year whether to force a former president to share his financial information in leaving office could have a “creepy effect” on all future commanders-in-chief. , as argued by Trump’s attorney, Cameron Norris.
At the same time, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the third judge to hear arguments but has since been elevated to the Supreme Court and did not participate in the opinion, expressed concern about establishing lasting protections for presidents after of returning to private life. , undermining the authority of Congress.
In the end, Srinivasan navigated a middle ground, analyzing the committee’s demand for three types of information: documents related to Trump’s financial and personal financial records with Mazars; records on the federal lease of the recently sold Trump International Hotel in the Old Post Office building in downtown Washington; and records related to legislation on the “foreign emoluments” clause of the Constitution, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign nations.
The court said lawmakers could obtain records, source documents and letters of commitment from Mazars from 2014 to 2018, but only those who “report, indicate or discuss any undisclosed, false or otherwise inaccurate information.” on Trump’s assets, liabilities or income. as well as any related communication that the information was incomplete, inaccurate or “otherwise unsatisfactory.”
The court also upheld the subpoena for documents related to his federal hotel lease ranging from Trump’s election in November 2016 to 2018, but only from the company that had the lease, Trump Old Post Office LLC. Finally, the appellate court agreed that the House could obtain all 2017 and 2018 documents related to financial ties or transactions between Trump or a Trump entity and “any foreign state or foreign state agency, the United States. , any federal agency, any state or any state agency or an individual government official. “
The committee has “accumulated detailed evidence of alleged misrepresentations and omissions” in Trump’s required disclosure forms, according to the court, and provided “detailed and substantial” explanations of how his financial disclosures, government contracts and acceptance of foreign gifts such as the president could report. changes to federal law to protect taxpayers and conflicts of police interests between political officials.
“If the level of evidence presented by the Committee here is not sufficient to obtain a reduced subset of the former president’s information, we doubt that any Congress can obtain the papers of a president,” the judges wrote, adding that “demand disclosures intended to prevent presidents.” to engage in self-employment and other conflicts of interest is certainly a legitimate legislative purpose. “
“Former President Donald Trump showed unprecedented contempt for federal ethics and financial transparency,” House Supervisory Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (DN.Y.) said in a statement. written. He said that while it was “disappointing for the Court to reduce the summons in some respects”, he was satisfied that he “kept key parts of the Committee’s summons, asserted our authority to obtain documents from Mazars and rejected the arguments”. President Trump’s false statements that Congress cannot. “Investigate his financial misconduct.”
Trump’s attorneys at the law firm Consovoy McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Friday’s ruling reduced a similar August 2021 decision by the case judge. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta limited documents that lawmakers could obtain to a broader set of Trump’s personal financial records from 2017 and 2018, when he was president, and records related to his rent. of hotel in Washington and the legislation on the emoluments clause.
The courts acted after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in July 2020 upheld the authority of General Congress to issue summonses for a president’s personal financial records, but ruled in an opinion of 7 to 2 that Congress citations seeking the information of a president should be “not broader than reasonably necessary” and returned the question to the lower courts to draft the rule.
The case was not resolved until the term of Congress expired in January 2020, but the newly elected House, still under democratic control, renewed its petition in February 2021.
Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.