Trump loses fight to shield tax files
Supreme Court sides with House panel in pursuit of records
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the imminent handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee after a three-year legal fight.
The court, with no noted dissents, rejected Trump’s plea for an order that would have prevented the Treasury Department from giving six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
In a separate legal matter involving the former president, a federal appeals court appeared deeply skeptical Tuesday that he was entitled to challenge an FBI search of his Florida estate or to have an independent arbiter review documents that were seized from the home.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, including two Trump appointees, repeatedly suggested Trump was seeking special treatment in asking that the “special master” conduct an independent inspection of records taken in the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
“Other than the fact that this involves a former president, everything else about this is indistinguishable from any pre-indictment search warrant,” said William Pryor, the court’s chief judge, a President George W. Bush appointee.
He added: “We’ve got to be concerned about the precedent we would create that would allow any target
of a federal criminal investigation to go into a district court and to have a district court entertain this kind of petition ... and interfere with the executive branch’s ongoing investigation.”
Alone among recent presidents, Trump refused to release his tax returns either during his successful 2016 campaign or his four years in the White House, citing what he said was an ongoing audit by the IRS. Last week, Trump announced he would run again in 2024.
It was the former president’s second loss at the Supreme Court in as many months, and third this year. In October, the court refused
to step into the legal fight surrounding the FBI search of Trump’s Florida estate that turned up classified documents.
In January, the court refused to stop the National Archives from turning over documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only vote in Trump’s favor.
In the dispute over his tax returns, the Treasury Department had refused to provide the records during Trump’s presidency. But the Biden administration said federal law is clear that the committee has the right
to examine any taxpayer’s return, including the president’s.
Lower courts agreed that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping and only wanted the documents so they could be made public.
Chief Justice John Roberts imposed a temporary freeze on Nov. 1 to allow the court to weigh the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyers and the counter arguments of the administration and the House of Representatives.
Just over three weeks later, the court lifted Roberts’
order without comment.
Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the committee chairman until the next Congress begins in January, said in a statement that his committee “will now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought for the last three and a half years.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The House Ways and Means panel first requested Trump’s tax returns in 2019 as part of an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s audit program and tax law compliance by the then-president. Federal law says the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the returns of any taxpayer to a handful of top lawmakers.
The special master in the Mar-a-Lago case, veteran New York Judge Raymond Dearie, was appointed in September at the Trump team’s request. He was tasked with conducting an independent inspection of the roughly 13,000 documents seized in the search and filtering out from the criminal investigation any that might be covered by claims of attorney-client or executive privilege.
Though the investigation is centered on the possible mishandling of classified records, the Justice Department says it also regards the unclassified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago as relevant to the probe. That’s because of the mingling with classified documents of personal records that prosecutors say could provide key evidence of ownership or possession.
“You’ve talked about all these other records and property that were seized,” Pryor told Trump lawyer James Trusty at one point. “I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of the government if someone has intermingled classified documents and all kinds of other personal property.”
Trusty denied that he was seeking special treatment for Trump but also urged the judges to consider the context of the case. “This is a situation where a political rival has been subjected to a search warrant where thousands of personal materials have been taken,” he said.
The special master process has been playing out alongside a criminal investigation into the retention of the documents and possible obstruction.