A Justice Department blockbuster statement on Friday means Congress will likely finally see Donald Trump’s elusive tax returns. The statement said that “the chairman of the House Budgets Committee gave reasonable grounds to request the former president’s tax information” – a justification for Congress’s years of efforts to generate this revenue, and a defeat for the former president. who worked hard to keep it a secret (suggesting proverbial corpses are buried there). The advisory opinion is also another example of the heinous lawlessness of Bill Barr’s Justice Department for refusing to hand them over earlier.
The search for Trump’s tax returns dates back to April 2019 – more than 27 months ago – when Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee that oversees tax affairs, the Ways and Means Committee, issued a formal, written claim to the IRS for six years of Trump’s personal returns and all returns from eight of his businesses.
Under Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Department declined and asked the DOJ to comment on whether the IRS was required to comply. Predictably, the DOJ’s elite Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) – which in the past acted as something of a mini-supreme court within the executive branch to gather measured opinions on vague constitutional law issues – followed Trump’s personal interests stated this in a memorandum dated June 2019 that Mnuchin could refuse Neal’s request. That statement, written over the signature of then Assistant Attorney General Steven A. Engel (who also penned an internal DoJ memo justifying Barr’s decision to pre-empt the Mueller report with a summary of his “main conclusions”) – a sleight of hand, the a federal judge struck in May in a bloody decision).
Also in April 2019, three other House Committees summoned information about Trump, his children and affiliates from Deutsche Bank, Capital One and Trump’s personal accounting firm Mazars USA LLP. In July 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled – in Trump v. Mazars, a 7-2 ruling drafted by Chief Justice Roberts and endorsed by Trump-appointed Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch – that banks and accountants must obey the subpoenas. and notes that “every congress house has the power to ‘obtain the information necessary’ to legislate,” and that such power is “indispensable” since without information Congress would not be able to be wise or effective To legislate. ”The court also reiterated its longstanding position that a subpoena from Congress is only valid if it is“ related to and promotes a legitimate task of Congress ”.
It is this caveat that Engel took on when Rep. Neal’s motion was rejected in 2019. Engel had argued that Mnuchin “reasonably and correctly concluded that the committee’s alleged interest in the Internal Revenue Service’s review of presidential returns audits was a pretext and that its real aim” was to obtain the tax returns of the To publish presidents, which is not a legitimate legislative purpose. “
Engel was completely wrong.
There is a glaring legal difference between Neal’s motion and the third party subpoenas in Mazars: the House Ways and Means Committee has the express legal authority to collect tax returns from the IRS – without the need to provide any excuses or reasons. And the committee’s reasons for demanding the tax returns are unquestionably legitimate, regardless of whether or not revealing Trump’s tax information would be to the political advantage of the Democrats in Congress.
Consider a little history of tax law: Congress enacted an income tax during the Civil War, under its articulated constitutional power to “raise and collect taxes”. For a while, only the President and the Treasury Secretary could allow tax information to be disclosed. But after President Warren G. Harding’s Teapot Dome bribery scandal, Congress decided he needed his own access to the tax records of federal officials suspected of misconduct. As part of the Revenue Act of 1924, Ways and Means – as well as the Senate Finance Committee and a then-unspecified “Special Committee” – were granted the right to phone the Treasury Secretary, which is his duty to provide all data of any kind contained in the returns or be shown. . . this can be requested by the committee. “
The 1954 Internal Revenue Code later added a phrase stating that whenever one of those Congressional tax committees requests tax returns, “that committee, which sits in the executive session, will transmit any information of any kind contained in a tax return are included or are included “. . ”(Emphasis added) Finally, in the Tax Reform Act of 1976, Congress restricted executive access to tax returns and required them to be“ confidential,. . . except as authorized by this Title ”, including“ upon written request from the Chairman of the Committee on Means and Ways of the House of Representatives ”.
In short, the law is clear: if the chairman of a tax-related congressional committee wishes to inspect tax returns, the Treasury Secretary must hand them over, with the only restriction that the committee must be behind closed doors and not in public, “unless that taxpayer agrees otherwise in writing to . . . Disclosure. ”The law does not make any exclusions for incumbent or past presidents.
Barr’s DOJ has effectively called off that mandate – and turned up its noses to the constitutional authority of Congress itself to pass laws and raise and collect taxes. It affirmed the clear legal authority over Rep. Neal’s motion, but made the false argument that the real purpose of the Ways and Means Committee was to publicly talk about Trump’s taxes and that the executive, as opposed to a court, ” Research on Congress Motivation ”and does not need to use the kind of“ deference to the decisions of the political bodies ”.
This is made up stuff.
ONAnd it’s pretty scary because it wasn’t the first time Bill Barr just ignored mandatory laws. As I wrote in October 2019
when a secret service insider accused Trump of using American military aid as a lever to get Ukraine to conduct an unfounded investigation into Joe Biden and his son. . . the current statute legally required the acting director of the national intelligence service to refer the complaint to Congress. Instead, Barr’s Justice Department released an irresponsible legal opinion to justify the fact that the whistleblower complaint had been withheld from Congress, despite the Inspector General’s official statement that the complaint was “credible” and “very worrisome,” which prompted congressional oversight .
Reasons for Neal’s request, updated since Joe Biden took office, include that “Former President Trump’s tax returns may reveal hidden business entanglements that raise tax law and other issues, including conflicts of interest that affect the proper performance of duties affect the former president. “And that an” independent review “of these documents” could also reveal foreign financial influences on the former President Trump, which could flow into the relevant legislation of Congress “. There is plenty of justification.
Meanwhile, Tom Barrack, a real estate investor who ran Trump’s 2017 presidential charter fund, was recently arrested on federal charges of secretly acting as a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates during the Trump presidency. Barrack oversaw Trump’s first $ 107 million fundraiser, which included $ 1 million from an unknown donor run through a limited company. He also worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on a super PAC called Rebuilding America Now, which was spending $ 21 million in support of Trump, and was reportedly injured for the potential use of straw donors for countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are investigating illegal donations. Separately, a jury convicted Manafort of eight criminal charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including filing false tax returns, bank fraud and failure to disclose a foreign bank account.
It is easy to fall into blissful amnesia when it comes to the shameless violations of the law by the Trump administration and the ex-president’s many criminal cronies. Given our shared focus on gas lighting in Congress over the January 6 riot and the validity of COVID vaccines and masking requirements, the fate of the rule of law in America seems less urgent. But the toxic filth left by the Trump administration remains. The DOJ’s U-turn on the executive’s constitutional obligation to obey the law is a critical step in the vital cleansing.