Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives on stage to talk during an event at his Mar-a-Lago home on November 15, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
The IRS has given six years of former President Donald Trump’s federal income tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, every week after the Supreme Court rejected his effort to dam the Democratic-controlled panel from getting those records.
The committee had been looking for Trump’s tax returns since 2019, when the Republican was still president.
A Treasury Department spokesperson told NBC News, “Treasury has complied with last week’s court decision.” The Treasury Department is the parent of the Internal Revenue Service.
The Ways and Means Committee has said it wanted copies of Trump’s returns, and the tax returns of several Trump legal entities, for an inquiry into how the IRS audits presidential tax returns. By law, the tax agency audits the returns of a sitting president every yr.
Trump as a presidential candidate after which as president broke many years of tradition by refusing to publicly release his tax returns. He claimed that he was withholding them from the general public because they were being audited. Nonetheless, there isn’t a legal bar that forestalls tax filers from releasing their returns to the general public.
The committee is not going to publicly disclose the returns, either.
It’s a felony for federal employees to reveal the contents of a tax return. Members of Congress are federal employees, as are congressional staff.
When the committee first asked for Trump’s returns three years ago, the Treasury Department refused to show them over. The panel then filed a lawsuit looking for to acquire the records.
The department dropped its resistance to the committee after President Joe Biden took office. Trump then sued to dam the discharge of the records.
The previous president lost that effort on the federal district court and appeals court levels, where judges ruled that the Ways and Means Committee had a clear-cut right under federal law to acquire the records, and had stated a legitimate legislative purpose for the request.
He then asked the Supreme Court for an emergency order blocking the committee from getting the returns.
A short lived block was granted by the Supreme Court.
But on Nov. 22, that nine-member court, with none dissents, rejected Trump’s request to take care of block, setting the stage for the IRS to deliver the returns to the Ways and Means Committee.
Trump, who had appointed three of the justices who make up the court’s six-justice supermajority, blasted the choice.
“Why would anybody be surprised that the Supreme Court has ruled against me, they at all times do!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social account.
“The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, & has change into nothing greater than a political body, with our Country paying the value.”
“Shame on them!” he wrote.
