Former United States President Donald Trump faces a downhill legal battle after a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a House committee is entitled to a wide array of records on the Republican businessman's finances and business practices.
However, the court also further narrowed aspects of the subpoena that the Democrat-controlled House issued to Trump's accountants in 2019. If the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision stands, the former president's former accounting firm, Mazars, will be required to give the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee five years' worth of records.
Trump's Legal Battle
The documents could potentially include inaccuracies in the financial statements of Trump or his business and a little more than two years of records related to the lease with the federal government for the former Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Furthermore, the accounting firm will also be required to provide records from 2017 and 2018 on transactions between the Trump Organization and any foreign, local, or state government or official. The former president could still ask the full bench of the D.C. Circuit to rehear the case or petition the Supreme Court to take it up again, as per Politico.
Two years ago, the justices issued an opinion rejecting Trump's sweeping claims of executive privilege but declared that lower courts did not do enough to scrutinize the House panel's purported needs for the information and whether or not the subpoena was tailored to those needs.
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In an opinion joined by Judge Judith Rogers, D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, Trump has uniquely pertinent information that cannot reasonably be obtained from any other source. However, they added that the committee's emoluments-related objectives cannot possibly justify the breadth of documents encompassed by the subpoena.
According to the Washington Post, the decision comes as the panel was revisiting a matter that the U.S. Supreme Court returned to the lower courts for further proceedings in July 2020. The 67-page opinion included Srinivasan's interpretation of how to apply the Supreme Court's directive to "insist on a subpoena no broader than reasonably necessary to support Congress' legislative objective.
Trump Organization
The case is known to deal with a largely unprecedented fight over how far Congress can go in investigating alleged corruption by the nation's chief executive, and what protections former presidents retain from lawmakers' probing after leaving office under the Constitution's separation of powers.
Trump's legal battle comes as he is expected to be preparing for another presidential bid in the 2024 elections. He was the first major party nominee in decades to refuse to release his tax returns, publicly criticizing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for auditing him.
The decision came, as last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that Trump's business firm should turn over some, but not all the financial records sought by the committee. Furthermore, the appeals court also noted that the former president has the right to continue fighting the subpoena, which means that the legal battle between him and the committee would most likely last longer, Fox News reported.
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