Washington: Former US president Donald Trump moved Wednesday to dam the Treasury from delivering years of his tax records to a congressional committee, which some believe could expose abuse of tax laws.
In a Washington court filing Trump’s lawyers objected to a Department of Justice order last week that the Treasury, after stalling for years, needed to supply the House Ways and Means Committee with six years of records that Trump has long refused to form public.
The lawyers argue that while the committee claims to be investigating how the interior Revenue Service handles cases like Trump’s — the previous president said for years that his taxes were under audit — actually the request is driven by politics.
The aim of the Democratic-controlled panel, the filing says, “is to show the private tax information of 1 individual — President Trump — for political gain The requests single out President Trump because he’s a Republican and a political opponent,” it adds.
“They were made to retaliate against President Trump due to his policy positions, his politics and his protected speech, including the positions he took during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns,” it said.
The US Department of Justice ordered the Treasury on Friday handy Trump’s tax records to the committee, which subpoenaed them in 2019.
Committee chairman Richard Neal had argued that his members needed the returns to know how the IRS conducts its presidential audits and whether Trump had exerted “undue influence” over the agency.
Trump claimed for years that he couldn’t make the records public because they were under audit, and when he was president, the Republican-controlled Treasury and Department of Justice sided with him on the difficulty .
Both departments are now led by Democrats, and therefore the Department of Justice argued last week that the committee had a legitimate interest in seeing Trump’s records.
Some suspect that the records would show the billionaire property tycoon manipulated the tax code to pay little or no over an extended period.
Trump is under investigation in ny for tax fraud and other wrongdoings concerning the financial activities of his Trump Organization In February the Supreme Court declined to dam a subpoena of Trump’s taxes by a replacement York prosecutors.
All US presidents since Nixon , who took office in 1969, have made public their tax and asset records.
