Trump Escalates the Fight Over His Tax Returns With a New Lawsuit

Trump’s lawsuit is a preemptive strike, asking a judge to halt any attempt to turn over his tax returns to congressional Democrats.

Michael Reynolds/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

President Donald Trump opened a new front in the battle to protect his tax returns from any prying Democratic eyes, filing a lawsuit against the congressional committee seeking his returns, as well as two top New York state officials. 

Trump’s lawsuit has targets the House Ways and Means Committee and New York’s attorney general and tax and finance commissioner. The Ways and Means Committee has a legal right to request anyone’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service and is locked in a legal battle with Trump over its attempt to invoke that law. Now, the president appears to be attempting to prevent any attempts to get his returns through a side door. That door was opened by the New York legislature this spring, when it passed a law allowing state authorities to provide copies of a person’s state tax returns to the Ways and Means Committee if it has already triedā€”and failedā€”to get the returns from the IRS.

Trump’s lawsuit asks for an injunction to prevent New York from turning over his tax records to Congress.

In its request for Trump’s tax returns, the Ways and Means committee specifically said it was asking to see the records as part of an investigation into how the IRS audits presidents. But Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin rejected the committee’s request this spring, saying that the committee had no real purpose for getting the president’s tax returns, other than to embarrass and politically damage him. 

Although Ways and Means Committee chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) has said he won’t be taking New York up on its offer to supply Trump’s state returns, Trump’s lawsuitā€”filed as a private citizen using his own lawyers, not Department of Justice attorneysā€”contends that Neal might be wavering. Specifically, the suit cites an NBC News article from Monday that claimed Neal is under increasing pressure from progressives in the Democratic Party to be more aggressive in his effort to get Trump’s tax returns. The suit also cites the fact that Neal now has a primary challenger. 

Trump’s lawsuit claims that if New York authorities, specifically the state attorney general and the New York Department of Taxation and Finance, were allowed to hand over Trump’s state tax records, it would violate his First Amendment rights because it would be done purely to punish him for his political beliefs. Trump’s lawsuit also claims that it would be unfair because he would have no opportunity to argue against the release, and that the records are out of Neal’s jurisdiction because they are state and not federal tax records. 

ā€œPresident Trump has spent his career hiding behind lawsuits, but, as New Yorkā€™s chief law enforcement officer, I can assure him that no one is above the lawā€”not even the president of the United States,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement, adding, “We have all the confidence that this law is legal and we will vigorously defend it against any court challenge.ā€

A spokeswoman for Neal did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Department of Taxation and Finance. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate