The Treasury Department announced on Wednesday that it had complied with a court order requiring it to provide a congressional committee with access to former President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Last week, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s request for a ruling that would have stopped the Treasury Department from providing the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee with six years’ worth of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses.
Without objection, the court overcame the legal barrier to Trump’s tax returns being made public.
Treasury has cooperated with the court’s ruling from last week, according to a department representative, but she would not confirm whether the committee got access to the records. Due to privacy concerns, the representative declined to provide a name.
Throughout the 2016 presidential election and his four years in the White House, Trump steadfastly refused to make his tax returns public.
Richard Neal, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a statement following the Supreme Court decision that “since the Magna Carta, the idea of supervision has been preserved, and today is no different. The Committee will now carry out the scrutiny that we have requested for the past three and a half years because this transcends politics.
During Trump’s administration, the Treasury Department had refused to turn over the documents in the controversy over his tax returns. However, the Biden administration said that it is obvious from federal law that the committee has the authority to review the tax returns of any taxpayer, including the president.
Trump’s arguments that the committee was overstepping its bounds and simply wanted the records so they could be made public were rejected by lower courts, which ruled that the committee had broad jurisdiction to collect tax returns.
On Nov. 1, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered a temporary freeze to give the court time to consider the legal arguments made by Trump’s attorneys as well as the opposition put out by the administration and the House of Representatives.
A little more than three weeks later, the court quietly lifted Roberts’ injunction.
