Donald Trump Dealt with Brutal Blow After Tax Returns Release Order: What Will Happen Now?

Former president Donald Trump's plea to prevent their release in the last weeks of Democratic control of the chamber was denied by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, paving the way for a House committee to obtain his tax returns.

The most recent case of the court siding against Trump, who chose three justices to the bench, came in the unsigned order, which did not mention any dissents.

Congress to View Trump's Tax Returns

The move indicates that the Treasury Department will likely soon provide the House, which has been asking for Trump's financial records since 2019, with those documents.

To pursue an appeal before the Supreme Court, Trump's legal team had sought the justices to prolong a lower court's stay. They had said that the House's request highlighted questions that were too crucial to allow the Treasury Department to turn over his papers before they were resolved, NY Times reported.

However, Douglas N. Letter, the head of the House's legal team, asked the Supreme Court not to become involved, citing the upcoming election of a new Congress in January. In a brief earlier this month, he stated that any further delay "would give the committee and Congress as a whole little or no time to accomplish their legislative job."

The Supreme Court abruptly announced that it was rejecting Trump's request for a delay. It did not provide any legal justification for the decision. A request for comment was not immediately answered by counsel for Trump or Richard E. Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Ways and Means Committee.

The dispute began when Trump declined to release his tax returns in 2016, defying a contemporary standard established by presidents and presidential candidates. Neal requested them from the Treasury Department in 2019, following the election of Democrats to control the House.

Trump Insists That Lower Courts Violate 'Mazars'

The Ways and Means Committee is authorized by law to view any taxpayer's records, but the Trump administration refused to allow the agency to provide the information. The House filed a lawsuit in July 2019 to have its demand carried out.

Neal's request, according to Trump's legal team, lacks a legitimate legislative goal. They have said that his justification that Congress needs the documents to explore a program that audits presidents is a political ruse.

After a prior visit to the Supreme Court, a separate legal dispute involving the House Oversight Committee's pursuit of Trump's tax records from his then-accounting company was settled earlier this year.

Per CNN, Trump said that lower courts had violated that 2020 ruling, known as Mazars, in his request to the Supreme Court to hear the latest issue with the Ways and Means committee.

Similar to the Mazars case, the current controversy, according to Trump's attorneys, "arises from a legislative demand for a President's personal information-a conflict between competing branches over data of high political interest for everybody concerned."

The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) refusal to provide the tax returns, according to the House, would leave legislators with "little or no time to accomplish their legislative job during this Congress, which is rapidly approaching its end."

With Republicans prepared to take over the House in January, Trump could have put the committee out of business if he had convinced the nation's highest court to get involved. If the matter still hadn't been settled by then, they almost probably would have abandoned the documents request, as per Al Jazeera via MSN.