Justice Department tells Treasury to turn over Trump tax records to House
New opinion defers to Congress about how much of the information could become public in a report to the House
By Todd Ruger
Posted July 30, 2021 at 4:00pm
The Justice Department told the Treasury Department on Friday that it must turn over former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and information to the House Ways and Means Committee — although a legal fight could remain.
The opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel reverses course from the DOJ’s 2019 opinion, during the Trump administration, to an initial request from Chairman Richard E. Neal, D-Mass. The Ways and Means Committee sued the Treasury Department for the information in a case still pending in the federal courts.
The Justice Department on Friday wrote that it reevaluated after Neal made a new request for the information last month for tax years 2015 through 2020. Neal wrote that the committee sought to evaluate, among other issues such as national security, “the extent to which the IRS audits and enforces the Federal tax laws against a President.”
That is “a plainly legitimate area for congressional inquiry and possible legislation,” the Justice Department wrote, “even if some individual legislators might have other reasons for wanting access to the information.”
The department’s previous position acknowledged that the law does not require Neal to state a purpose when requesting tax returns. But the Justice Department back then concluded that Congress can’t give itself the right to compel information that does not serve a legitimate legislative purpose, and that Neal’s request was “pretextual.”
https://www.rollcall.com/2021/07/30/justice-department-tells-treasury-to-turn-over-trump-tax-records-to-house/