Treasury, White House discussed tax return request, Mnuchin says
WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers Tuesday that White House lawyers had been in touch with his department about a congressional request for President Donald Trump’s tax returns, but said he had not personally spoken to Trump or those lawyers about how the matter was being handled.
Mnuchin’s disclosure is the first public acknowledgment of communication between the White House and the Treasury Department related to Trump’s tax returns and underscores the seriousness with which the president is taking the congressional request to obtain his personal financial records.
Mnuchin, who is testifying before two congressional committees Tuesday, acknowledged that White House lawyers had been in touch with his department before the formal request was made last week. But he said that he had not been briefed on those discussions and described them as “informational.”
“Our legal department has had conversations prior to receiving the letter with the White House general counsel,” Mnuchin said. “I acknowledge there were conversations. I am not briefed on the full extent of those conversations.”
During a marathon set of hearings that lasted more than four hours, Mnuchin parried multiple questions about how he would handle a request for the president’s taxes. Mnuchin both defended Trump’s right to keep his tax returns private and tried to assure lawmakers that he would not allow politics to interfere with Treasury’s decision about whether to provide the records to Congress. Democrats appeared largely unsatisfied, at one point questioning Mnuchin about whether he was putting his job security before his legal obligations.
“It is our intent to follow the law,” Mnuchin said. “It is being reviewed by the legal departments, and we look forward to responding to the letter.”
“I am not afraid of being fired at all,” he added.
Still, Mnuchin suggested he believed that Congress was overreaching its authority and defended Trump’s right not to release his tax returns.
“The general public when they elected President Trump made the decision to elect him without his tax returns being released,” Mnuchin said, adding that the president complied with requirements to release a financial disclosure form.
Mnuchin said it would be “premature” to comment on how his agency would respond to the formal request by House Democrats for six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns.
The request for Trump’s tax returns is putting Mnuchin, one of his most loyal aides, at the center of what is shaping up to be an extraordinary legal battle between two branches of the U.S. government.
Mnuchin said that he believed it was “appropriate” for the Treasury and White House legal departments to have spoken generally about a potential request, but he emphasized that he would not be taking direction from the president on the decision.
“We would not ever ask for the White House’s permission on this, nor did they give us permission,” Mnuchin said.
His statement that the White House had reached out to Treasury about the congressional request sent Democratic aides scrambling to assess whether those conversations represented political interference and violated the law.
But Lawrence B. Gibbs, a former IRS commissioner and counsel during the Nixon administration, said he was aware of no legal statute that prohibited such dialogue.