White House Indicates It Won’t Meet Deadline for Trump Tax Returns
House Ways and Means chairman has requested the documents by 5 p.m.
“Once he’s out of audit, he’ll think about doing it. But he’s not inclined to do so at this time,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said on Fox News. “There is nothing nefarious there at all. This was litigated in 2016.”
The White House’s arguments about audits and public disinterest are disconnected from the arguments the Trump administration would eventually have to make to persuade judges that Congress is acting beyond its legal authority.
The request for the returns was made to the IRS under a law that would require them to be handed over, but Mr. Trump has strongly indicated his preference that they not be released. Treasury Department and IRS officials on Tuesday didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Rep. Richard Neal (D., Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has said he would interpret a failure to meet Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline as a denial of the request. He may soon issue a subpoena for the president’s returns or take the IRS straight to federal court to enforce a 1924 law that lets the chairmen of congressional tax-writing committees get any taxpayer’s returns.
Mr. Trump’s lawyer’s said in 2016 that he was under audit for tax years starting in 2009. As president, his returns face a mandatory audit under an IRS policy.
That audit and the fact that the returns were discussed during the 2016 election are irrelevant to Mr. Neal’s request. When Democrats took control of the House in January, he gained the power to obtain anyone’s tax returns.
Democrats say the returns could reveal more information about the former real-estate developer’s
- sources of income,
- tax strategies,
- charitable giving and any
- conflicts of interest.
Legal observers generally agree that the tax-writing committee must have a legislative purpose for getting one’s tax returns, and any court case could turn on whether that standard has been met. In his April 3 request, Mr. Neal argued that Congress needs to see how well the IRS is auditing the president and raised the possibility Congress could consider legislation in that area.
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and his allies in Congress have dismissed that reasoning as pretext. In their view, Democrats are on a political quest.
Democrats see a simple statute being ignored. If Mr. Mnuchin doesn’t turn over the documents, “he is likely engaged in the most serious executive branch defiance of law since the Nixon Administration,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary, wrote on Twitter.
It could now take months for the legal process to unfold, and both sides seem dug in. Judges will look, in part, to a 1957 case in which the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a man who had refused to answer some questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“We have no doubt that there is no congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure. The public is, of course, entitled to be informed concerning the workings of its government,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. “That cannot be inflated into a general power to expose where the predominant result can only be an invasion of the private rights of individuals.”
Mr. Neal sought six years of the president’s individual and business tax returns. If Mr. Neal does get the documents, his committee would first be able to view them in a closed session, and Mr. Neal could designate agents to review them, including the experienced nonpartisan staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.
It would then take a vote by the full Ways and Means Committee to make the tax returns, or a report based on them, a public document. Democrats outnumber Republicans on that committee 25 to 17.