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On April 11, President Trump speaks at the Oval Office. (Oliver Contreras / For the Washington Post)
Tom Hamburger
An investigative journalist focused on the intersection of money and politics in Washington.
President Trump's lawyers said Monday at an accounting firm working for the president that it would be inappropriate to hand over tax documents to a House committee supposed to issue a subpoena for the document.
Last week, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), Announced his intention to call Mazars USA after the company rejected a request for financial disclosure. of Trump, citing laws and rules requiring a summons to appear for such documents.
Cummings said the company had requested a "subpoena" before responding to the request for information regarding the Trump organization, the revocable trust of the president and other entities.
[House Democrats to subpoena accounting firm for Trump’s financial records]
On Monday, the lawyers for the president and the Trump organization wrote in a letter to the accounting firm's lawyer that a summons to appear before a committee "would be neither valid nor enforceable".
The president's lawyers – William S. Consovoy and Stefan Passantino – have written that a subpoena of the Cummings expert panel would be invalid "because it has no legitimate legislative objective".
They said, "The real reason why President Cummings wants our clients' financial information provided by our clients is to advance the Democratic Party's agenda to politically attack President Trump. . . . The fervor of the Democrats intensified only when the Special Council stifled their speech on "connivance with Russia". "
An attorney from Mazars USA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Cummings did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The pressure on the accounting firm to resist the impending House summons comes after the Treasury Department missed a first deadline for submitting Trump's tax returns to the House's Ways and Means Committee, which then April.
Democrats in the House are waiting for the Trump government to attack the courts regarding tax returns. They looked for other ways to become familiar with Trump's business practices.
The House of Representatives committee told Mazars that it was looking for the necessary documents to corroborate the testimony of former President's attorney Michael Cohen, who recently said in a congressional hearing that Trump had inflated and artificially deflated the declared value of his assets for personal gain.
[How Donald Trump inflated his net worth to lenders and investors]
At the time of his testimony, Cohen provided the Committee with the financial statements that he believed Deutsche Bank had provided Deutsche Bank with in an attempt to purchase the Buffalo Bills in 2014.
The documents showed that Trump's net worth had risen from $ 4.55 billion in 2012 to $ 8.66 billion in 2013 due to the addition of one position for $ 4 billion of "brand value" – essentially the value that Trump bore to his name.
On 20 March, the Oversight Committee sent a letter to Mazars asking for information on how these financial statements and other disclosure documents had been prepared.
Consovoy and Passantino wrote Monday to Cummings that Mazars was required to refuse the committee's request "under federal law, New York law and ethical rules governing the obligations of accountants to their customers. Further attempts to obtain this information (by subpoena or otherwise) would be inappropriate for many reasons. "
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