Former President Donald Trump’s income tax returns can be given over to Congress, the Department of Justice announced Friday.
The Office of Legal Counsel for DOJ said that Congress — specifically the House Ways and Means Committee — made a “legitimate request” to review the former president’s tax records.
The 39-page Justice Department opinion found that, under federal law, there is “ample basis” for the Department of Treasury to hand over the returns to the committee for the “principal stated objective of assessing the IRS’s presidential audit program — a plainly legitimate area for congressional inquiry and possible legislation.”
“The statute at issue here is unambiguous,” the opinion from acting Assistant Attorney General Dawn Johnsen states. “‘Upon written request’ of the chairman of one of the three congressional tax committees, the Secretary ‘shall furnish’ the requested tax information to the Committee.”
The opinion is the latest development in a yearslong battle over whether to make Trump’s tax returns public, something the impeached former president resisted before, during and after being sworn in.
In April 2019, Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, requested the Treasury Department provide six years of Trump’s returns because it was considering bills and oversight in connection with federal tax law, but the then Trump-controlled Justice Department opined against it.
But last month, the Ways and Means committee sued to enforce subpoenas demanding the documents, and Neal submitted another request to the Justice Department, which now falls under the purview of President Joe Biden.
The latest opinion from the Justice Department comes more than a year after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s taxes had to be turned over to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for its criminal investigation into Trump’s business interests.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the one-term president’s appeal to block a subpoena seeking eight years of his personal and corporate financial records from before and during his time in the White House, giving Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance the green light to share the records with a grand jury.
The opinion issued by the Justice Department on Friday means there is now one more mechanism for the returns to see the light of day, but it is unclear when that might happen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the decision, saying access to the records “is a matter of national security.”
“The Biden administration has delivered a victory for the rule of law, as it respects the public interest by complying with Chairman Neal’s request for Donald Trump’s tax returns,” she said. “The American people deserve to know the facts of his troubling conflicts of interest and undermining of our security and democracy as president.”
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