The tax returns of former President Donald Trump have been made accessible to a congressional committee, according to the Treasury Department, in accordance with a court order.
Trump had asked the Supreme Court last week for a ruling that would have barred the Treasury Department from providing the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee with six years’ worth of tax returns for Trump and certain of his businesses. The Supreme Court denied Trump’s request.
Without objection, the court overcame the legal barrier to the release of Trump’s tax returns.
Despite declining to confirm whether the committee had access to the papers, a department representative said that Treasury had followed with the court’s ruling from last week. Due to privacy concerns, the spokesman refrained from giving his or her identity.
Throughout his 2016 campaign for president as well as his four years in office, Trump steadfastly refused to make his tax returns public.
In a statement following the Supreme Court decision, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, stated that the notion of supervision has been preserved ever since the Magna Carta, and that is still the case today. Politics have no place in this; the Committee will now carry out the supervision we’ve requested for the past three and a half years.
An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by the Trump campaign.
During Trump’s administration, the Treasury Department has refused to turn over the documents in the controversy over his tax returns. However, the Biden administration said that it is obvious from a federal law that the committee has the authority to review the tax returns of any taxpayer, including the president.
Lower courts concurred that the committee had extensive jurisdiction to get tax returns and rejected Trump’s arguments that it had overstepped its bounds and was only seeking the records for public consumption.
On November 1, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary freeze to give the court time to consider the legal arguments made by Trump’s counsel as well as the administration and the House of Representative’s rebuttals.