In blow to Trump, Supreme Court permits House to obtain his tax returns

The Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for a House committee to obtain former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, refusing his request to block their release after a yearslong fight.

The court’s order was another decisive defeat for Trump delivered by a court that had moved to the right with his appointment of three justices. The decision means the Treasury Department is likely to soon turn over six years of his tax returns to the House, which has been seeking his financial records since 2019.

Rep. Richard Neal, District of Massachusetts, who requested the files as the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement that his panel would “now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought for the last three and a half years.”

Lawyers for Trump, who announced last week that he would run for president again, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Also Read | Musk says Trump's Twitter account to be reinstated after poll shows narrow support

Trump has used the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on various oversight and investigative efforts. His stonewalling and legal challenges have succeeded in keeping the House from obtaining his tax returns for nearly four years, but that strategy appears to have fallen just short. The House would almost certainly have dropped the request for Trump’s tax returns in January, when Republicans take control of the chamber.

His lawyers had urged the justices to extend a lower court’s stay that had blocked the Treasury Department from providing the files, giving them more time to pursue an appeal before the Supreme Court. Douglas N Letter, the chief lawyer for the House, had urged the Supreme Court not to intervene. Any further delay “would leave the committee and Congress as a whole little or no time to complete their legislative work,” he wrote in a brief this month.

Early in 2019, Neal had asked the Treasury Department to provide Trump’s tax returns under a law that gives the Ways and Means Committee the authority to see any taxpayer’s documents.

While Neal has said the committee was studying whether changes were needed to an IRS program that audits presidents, Trump supporters maintain that is a pretext for a politically motivated fishing expedition and that Congress lacks a legitimate legislative purpose in seeking the records.