Ruling upholds House panel's request for Trump tax returns

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the House could gain access to former President Donald Trump's tax returns, upholding a district court judge's decision last year.

In a 28-page ruling, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that a federal law gives a House committee chair broad authority to request them despite Trump's status as a former president.

The Treasury Department refused to turn over the records during his administration. But after President Joe Biden took office last year, the department determined that a renewed request from the House Ways and Means Committee, which said that it was studying a program that audits presidents, was valid.

The appeals court's ruling does not necessarily mean that Congress will obtain the records. Trump's legal team has vowed to fight the congressional effort "tooth and nail," and he is virtually certain to appeal to the Supreme Court. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm elections and before there is any final judgment, the Ways and Means Committee would be led by a Republican and most likely drop the request.

The taxes case is rooted in Trump's decision — first as a presidential candidate in the 2016 election and then in office — to break with modern precedent by refusing to make his tax returns public.

When Democrats won control of the House in 2018, they began trying to investigate his finances using congressional oversight powers. Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified that the president had boasted about inflating the value of assets when it served him and undervaluing them when it helped to lower his taxes.

But Trump pursued a strategy of using the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on congressional oversight efforts. His administration's Treasury Department refused to comply with the request, and the House filed a lawsuit seeking to enforce it in early July 2019. But the judge to which it was assigned — Trevor McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, whom Trump appointed in 2017 — was slow to make any ruling.

Trump's lawyers sought an injunction to block the request, saying it served no legitimate legislative purpose and contending that House Democrats' real motivation was to expose his financial information for political gain. House lawyers said there were legislative reasons to seek the returns, including studying whether changes were needed to the IRS program that audits presidents.

In December, nearly 2 1/2 years after the House filed the case, McFadden issued a ruling on it. While warning the committee that he did not think it would be wise for it to publish Trump's tax returns, the judge ruled that the law entitled the panel to gain access to them.

In the appeals court ruling Tuesday upholding that decision, Judge David B. Sentelle also wrote that the law that gives the chair of that panel broad authority to request any person's tax returns was constitutional on its face. He said the request applying that law for Trump's taxes did not violate separation-of-powers principles because it imposed only a minor burden on the executive branch.

Sentelle also rejected an argument by Trump's lawyers that the Treasury Department's decision to comply with the request violated the former president's First Amendment rights.

In a statement, Neal praised the decision.

Sentelle is a 1987 Ronald Reagan appointee. He was fully joined by Judge Robert Wilkins, a 2014 Barack Obama appointee. The third judge on the panel, Karen Henderson, who was appointed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, joined the result and part of the majority reasoning.

But she wrote separately to express greater caution about the potential separation-of-powers issues raised by "Congress' potential and incentive to threaten a sitting president with a post-presidency" request for tax returns "in order to influence the president while in office."

Henderson wrote: "Although I agree with my colleagues that the burdens imposed on the presidency by the committee's request do not rise to the level of a separation-of-powers violation, I conclude that the burdens borne by the executive branch are more severe and warrant much closer scrutiny than my colleagues have given them."