Trump ordered to give some tax records to House

Former President Donald J. Trump’s accounting firm must give Congress his tax and other financial records from his time in the White House, and for a longer period about his lease of a government-owned building for a hotel, a judge ruled on Wednesday in a longrunning legal fight over a House subpoena.

But in his 53-page opinion, the judge, Amit P.

Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also ruled that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform was not entitled to other financial records covering years before Trump took office. The panel had issued a broad request for records dating back to 2011.

“In the current polarized political climate, it is not difficult to imagine the incentives a Congress would have to threaten or influence a sitting president with a similarly robust subpoena, issued after he leaves office, in order to ‘aggrandize itself at the president’s expense,’ ” Mehta wrote, citing a Supreme Court ruling last year.

The split decision means that either side, or both sides, may appeal Mehta’s ruling, so the case may not be resolved anytime soon. But in one respect, the stakes have been lowered: The Manhattan district attorney’s office obtained similar records this year from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA.

The litigation grew out of Trump’s refusal, in a break with modern precedent, to make his tax returns public when he ran for president and once he was in office. After Democrats took over the House in 2019, the Oversight and Reform Committee issued a subpoena for the records from Mazars and separately requested copies of his tax returns from the Treasury Department.