This is a just a way to prolong the fight against Trump & Co”s stonewalling …..
The House Democrats can get copies of Trump’s state income taxes anytime they want from New York State…
Those return would closely mirror the federal information…
This move by the House Ways and Means committee is a way to actually get the tax returns and codify the rule that American President’s MUST reveal their federal tax return information…… even if they own the Treasury Dept. political leadership…
The law actually says this….
The committee, which writes American tax law HAS the right to examine any and all tax related data….
Congress HAS had the right , and acted, at times to balance the power of the executive branch….
Donald Trump…
Still viewing himself as a private businessman is sure to lose this in the end…
But by fighting?
He’s just putting off the unavoidable….
The House’s tax-writing committee sued the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday demanding access to President Trump’s tax returns, escalating a fight with an administration that has repeatedly dismissed as illegitimate the Democrats’ attempt to obtain Mr. Trump’s financial records.
The lawsuit moves the dispute into federal courts after months of sniping between the Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee, which requested and then subpoenaed the returns, and the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The outcome is likely to determine whether financial information that Mr. Trump — breaking with longstanding tradition — has kept closely guarded as a candidate and as president will be viewed by Congress and, ultimately, by the public.
In Tuesday’s filing, the House argued that the administration’s defiance of its request amounted to “an extraordinary attack on the authority of Congress to obtain information needed to conduct oversight of Treasury, the I.R.S., and the tax laws on behalf of the American people.”
[Read the committee’s legal complaint.]
But with the House and the executive branch locked in a broader struggle over access to information from and witnesses in the Trump administration, the stakes in the tax-return lawsuit may be higher than that particular issue. House Democrats are facing resistance on a broad range of investigations that include inquiries into Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry into Russian election interference, the addition of a citizenship question into the 2020 census, and the profits gleaned from Mr. Trump’s ongoing business ventures.