Comment A federal appeals court ruled Friday that House lawmakers can see former President Donald Trump’s financial accounting records, but limited the scope of documents Trump must turn over in a long-running legal battle over his compliance with presidential ethics and disclosure laws. The fight isn’t over — both sides can still appeal the three-judge panel’s decision to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit or to the Supreme Court. But the ruling marked a partial victory for each side in a subpoena issued in 2019 by the House Oversight Committee to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. “We uphold the Commission’s authority to subpoena certain of President Trump’s financial records in furtherance of the Commission’s enumerated legislative purposes,” Chief District Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote. “But we cannot maintain the scope of the Commission’s subpoena.” The committee was reviewing a matter that the US Supreme Court sent back to lower courts for further proceedings in July 2020. In a complex, detailed 67-page opinion, Srinivasan interpreted how to apply the Supreme Court’s directive to “insist on a subpoena no broader than reasonably necessary to further Congress’s legislative objective.” The case deals with a largely unprecedented fight over how far Congress can go in investigating alleged corruption by the nation’s chief executive and what protections former presidents retain from lawmakers’ investigations after they leave office. based on the separation of powers of the Constitution. Trump, who lost re-election in 2020 and is likely preparing another run for the White House in 2024, was the first major-party candidate in decades to refuse to release his tax returns, publicly criticizing the Internal Revenue Service for control of it. Trump refused to divest his business holdings and while in office oversaw the government leasing agency for his flagship hotel in Washington, even though his businesses received millions from both the federal government and foreign powers. In response, congressional Democrats launched several efforts to investigate his finances, which Trump rebuffed. The House Oversight Committee has asked Mazars for a wealth of information about Trump and his business entities over an eight-year period from 2011 to 2018, saying his presidency revealed weaknesses in oversight that could only be addressed with the information. The committee said it sought the documents to corroborate former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s testimony that Trump artificially inflated and deflated the reported value of his assets for personal gain. Trump filed a lawsuit in May 2019 to block the release, arguing that he enjoyed blanket immunity from legislative investigations and that House Democrats only wanted to expose his data for political gain. In another case still pending appeal, Trump also objected to a request by the House Ways and Means Committee to see six years of his federal tax records. After Trump left office, President Biden’s Treasury Department agreed that the records should be released, and a federal judge appointed by Trump agreed last December. Trump continued to fight for the release as a private individual. The justices in Friday’s ruling — Srinivasan and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Judith W. Rogers — questioned during oral arguments late last year whether forcing a former president to release his financial information when he leaves office could have “chilling effect” on all future commanders in chief. , as argued by Trump’s lawyer Cameron Norris. At the same time, Ketanji Brown Jackson — the third justice to hear arguments but who has since been elevated to the Supreme Court and did not participate in the opinion — expressed concerns about carving out long-term protections for presidents after they return to private life, undermining the power of Congress . In the end, Srinivasan struck a middle ground, breaking down the committee’s request for three types of information — documents related to Trump’s business and personal financial records with Mazars. records related to the federal lease for Trump’s recently sold Trump International Hotel in the Old Post Office building in downtown Washington. and records related to legislation regarding the “foreign emoluments” clause of the Constitution, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign nations. The court said lawmakers could obtain Mazars records, source documents and engagement letters from 2014 to 2018, but only those that “state, indicate or discuss any undisclosed, false or otherwise inaccurate information” about the reported assets. , liabilities or income of Trump. as well as any relevant notices that the information was incomplete, inaccurate or “otherwise unsatisfactory”. The court also upheld a subpoena for documents related to his federal hotel lease from Trump’s election in November 2016 to 2018, but only from the business that held the lease, Trump Old Post Office LLC. Finally, the appeals court agreed that the House could obtain all documents from 2017 and 2018 related to financial ties or transactions between Trump or a Trump entity and “any foreign state or foreign governmental agency, the United States, any federal organization, any state or any government agency or individual government official’. The panel has “gathered detailed evidence of suspected misrepresentations and omissions” in Trump’s required disclosure forms, the court said, and provided “detailed and substantial” explanations of how his financial disclosures, government contracts and acceptance of foreign gifts as president they could update. changes in federal law designed to protect taxpayers and police conflicts of interest among political officials; “If the level of evidence presented by the Commission here is insufficient to obtain a limited subset of the former president’s information, we doubt that any Congress could obtain the President’s documents,” the judges wrote, adding that “requiring disclosure with the goal of preventing presidents from engaging in self-dealing and other conflicts of interest is certainly a legitimate legislative purpose.” “Former President Donald Trump has demonstrated an unprecedented disregard for federal ethics and financial transparency,” House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (DN.Y.) said in a written statement. She said that while it was “disappointing that the Court limited the subpoena in some respects,” she was pleased that it “upheld key parts of the Commission’s subpoena, affirmed our authority to obtain documents from Mazars, and rejected former President Trump’s bogus arguments that Congress cannot investigate his financial misconduct.” Trump’s lawyers at the law firm Consovoy McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. Friday’s ruling reduced a similar ruling in August 2021 by the judge in the case. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta limited documents lawmakers could obtain on a broader set of Trump’s personal financial records from 2017 and 2018, when he was president, and records related to his Washington hotel lease and legislation on the emoluments clause. The courts acted after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in July 2020 upheld Congress’ power generally to issue subpoenas for a president’s personal financial records, but ruled 7 to 2 that congressional subpoenas seeking a president’s information must be “no broader than reasonably necessary” and returned the question to the lower courts to work out the standard. The case was not resolved before the end of Congress in January 2020, but the newly elected House, still controlled by Democrats, renewed its request in February 2021. Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.
