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A federal district judge ruled Tuesday that the Treasury Department can give former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to Ways and Means Chairman Richard E. Neal — and that Congress has the power to make them public.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden in Washington dismissed Trump’s challenge to a request from Neal to get the records through a provision in a 1976 law. The ruling also gives Trump 14 days to appeal.
McFadden wrote that Trump presented evidence that suggested the Ways and Means Committee’s purported interest in Trump’s returns — a review of an IRS policy that requires audits of the sitting president — is subterfuge for improper motives like exposing his returns.
“But even if the former President is right on the facts, he is wrong on the law,” McFadden, a Trump appointee, wrote. His ruling, however, included a warning for Neal and Democrats about the political implications of going after the private returns of a political rival.
That law gives Neal, as committee chairman, the power to request to see those returns, and it also allows three committees to submit them to the full House or Senate and place them in the congressional record, McFadden wrote.
“A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries,” McFadden wrote. “Even the special solicitude accorded former Presidents does not alter the outcome.”
The ruling is the latest twist in a long legal and political brawl over the returns, and intrigue and speculation about what might be in them. Congress has never requested the tax information of a sitting or former president, but Trump broke with a tradition set by his predecessors by refusing to release them before his election, citing an ongoing IRS audit.
“We are in uncharted territory,” McFadden wrote.
In a news release, Neal called the ruling “no surprise” because the law is clearly on the committee’s side. “I am pleased that we’re now one step closer to being able to conduct more thorough oversight of the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.
