Trump asks judge to block release of tax returns to Congress after Justice Department order

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump on Wednesday called on a federal judge to block a Justice Department order requiring the IRS to turn over years of its tax returns to Congress.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that the House Ways and Means Committee is seeking returns simply to seek embarrassing information.

Lawyers have requested a permanent injunction barring the IRS from complying with the committee’s request regarding Trump’s tax returns.

The expected decision came nearly a week after the Justice Department’s legal adviser’s office reversed its 2019 opinion, saying the returns should be disclosed to the Democratic-led committee, which had been seeking the documents for several years.

The OLC said that Ways and Means, like other congressional tax commissions, has a “broad right” to obtain taxpayer information from the Treasury Department, the parent company of the IRS.

The OLC also said there was a legitimate legislative objective in this particular case: to assess how the IRS verifies presidential tax returns.

Trump’s lawyers, in their new case in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, argued the justification was a pretext.

“While House Democrats had offered countless justifications for obtaining the president’s tax returns, no one at the time had ever mentioned the desire to know how the IRS audits presidents,” the file says.

“The [committee] The president’s request hardly resembled an effort to investigate how the IRS audits presidents, ”the file says.

“He asked for information from a single president, asked for open files for which audits had not been completed, and never asked the IRS for the most relevant information, namely how it audits presidents. “

The file says the judge should decide that the return requests, which were made separately in 2019 and 2021, are “illegal and unenforceable because they have no legitimate legislative purpose, go beyond legal authority, violate the former amendment, violate due process, and / or violate the separation of powers. “

Trump broke decades of precedent as a candidate and president by refusing to disclose his tax returns.

Trump was president when the DOJ first opposed the release of his tax returns to the Ways and Means Committee.

The DOJ’s change of mind came months after President Joe Biden took office and Merrick Garland was appointed attorney general.

Last year, the Supreme Court rejected a final push by Trump to block the disclosure by his accountants of his tax returns and other financial documents to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is conducting a criminal investigation into his business.

Last month, the prosecutor accused the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, of an alleged long-term ploy to avoid paying taxes on executive pay.