Amy Howe

Oct 31 2022

Trump asks court to block House committee from obtaining his tax returns

Former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block the disclosure of his federal income tax returns to a congressional committee.

Without the court’s intervention, the House Committee on Ways and Means is poised to obtain six years of tax returns for Trump and the companies he owns. Trump’s legal team told the justices that allowing the committee to get those records would undermine the separation of powers and violate a Supreme Court ruling in a prior case involving a different congressional attempt to obtain Trump’s tax records.

The battle began in 2019, when the Ways and Means committee, led by Democrats, asked the IRS for tax returns associated with Trump and his businesses. A federal law, 26 U.S.C. § 6103(f), allows the committee to obtain “any return or return information” from the IRS, including tax returns for individual taxpayers.

When the Department of the Treasury under the Trump administration declined to turn over the returns, the committee sued. Before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ruled on the committee’s request, President Joe Biden was elected and took office in January 2021. That prompted the committee to renew its request, this time with more information about why it wanted the returns – specifically, as part of its consideration of legislation on how federal tax laws apply to a sitting president. This time, the Treasury Department said it would turn over the documents, leading the committee to seek to dismiss its lawsuit.

Trump, who had intervened in the lawsuit, then filed his own claims, seeking to block the disclosure of his tax returns to the committee. McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled against Trump, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that ruling. In an opinion by a three-judge panel that included two Republican appointees, the court ruled in August that the committee stated a valid legislative purpose for its request and has a right to obtain the documents. The panel rejected Trump’s argument that the committee’s real motive was to expose Trump’s finances and gather evidence to use against Trump in a criminal case.

“The mere fact that individual members of Congress may have political motives as well as legislative ones is of no moment,” Judge David Sentelle wrote for the panel.

Last week, the full D.C. Circuit declined to reconsider the case, prompting Trump to come to the Supreme Court. In his emergency request, he argued that the committee’s stated legislative goals are merely a pretext. Comments from top Democrats like the committee’s chairman, Richard Neal, D-Mass., “evince quite a different purpose: exposing President Trump’s tax information to the public for the sake of exposure,” Trump’s legal team wrote.

Allowing the committee to obtain the information would violate the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Trump v. Mazars, a case involving separate 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, and it sent the dispute back to the lower courts. Trump’s former accounting firm recently began turning over to Congress some of the documents at issue in that litigation.

This post is also published on SCOTUSblog.

Amy L Howe
Until September 2016, Amy served as the editor and reporter for SCOTUSblog, a blog devoted to coverage of the Supreme Court of the United States; she continues to serve as an independent contractor and reporter for SCOTUSblog. Before turning to full-time blogging, she served as counsel in over two dozen merits cases at the Supreme Court and argued two cases there. From 2004 until 2011, she co-taught Supreme Court litigation at Stanford Law School; from 2005 until 2013, she co-taught a similar class at Harvard Law School. She has also served as an adjunct professor at American University’s Washington College of Law and Vanderbilt Law School. Amy is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a master’s degree in Arab Studies and a law degree from Georgetown University.
Tweets by @AHoweBlogger
Recent ScotusBlog Posts from Amy
  • Supreme Court issues two rulings specifying where challenges to EPA actions on clean air must be filed
  • Court upholds Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatments for transgender minors
  • Businesses challenge Trump’s tariffs before Supreme Court
More from Amy Howe

Recent Posts

  • Court appears to back legality of HHS preventative care task force
  • Justices take up Texas woman’s claim against USPS
  • Supreme Court considers parents’ efforts to exempt children from books with LGBTQ themes
  • Justices temporarily bar government from removing Venezuelan men under Alien Enemies Act
  • Court hears challenge to ACA preventative-care coverage
Site built and optimized by Sound Strategies