House Committee Reissues Subpoena for Trump’s Financial Records

President Donald Trump speaks to the media before departing the White House to Joint Base Andrews, on March 13, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

The House Oversight and Reform Committee reissued its subpoena seeking to gain access to President Donald Trump’s financial records, according to a court filing.

The subpoena renews a request to Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA to hand over eight years of financial records involving the former president and his business as part of a probe into allegations about Trump’s financial statements.

Trump went to the federal court to challenge the original subpoena to block its enforcement shortly after it was issued in April 2019. That subpoena expired in January when new lawmakers took office.

Attorneys for each party in the case informed the judge on March 2 that the subpoena had been reissued by the new Oversight panel to Mazars on Feb. 25. They also submitted a schedule on how the parties would proceed with the case while asking the court to set a date for a hearing.

While the subpoena shows a return deadline of noon on March 11, the lawyers said the Oversight panel “agrees to voluntarily stay the return date of the subpoena pending this Court’s resolution of the subpoena’s enforceability.”

Lawyers for Trump and Mazars didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment on the renewed subpoena.

Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a memo on Feb. 23 that the committee during the 117th Congress will continue targeting Trump for its investigation into alleged presidential conflicts of interest, saying that his financial documents are crucial to “verify key facts and tailor legislative reforms to be as effective and efficient as possible.”

“Donald Trump’s unprecedented actions as President—including his refusal to divest from his ‘complex and opaque financial holdings’—have laid bare several apparent weaknesses and gaps in the laws and regulations governing presidential financial disclosure, conflicts of interest, and emoluments,” Maloney wrote.

Trump has repeatedly called the investigations seeking his financial records a continuation of a political “witch hunt,” while his lawyers and former Solicitor General Noel Francisco have raised questions in court about whether there are any legitimate legislative purposes for issuing the subpoenas. Instead, the lawyers said the House sought the records to harass the president, “expose personal matters, and conduct law enforcement activities beyond its authority.”

The case relating to the Oversight committee subpoena went through months of litigation before it arrived at the Supreme Court in 2020. It was combined with a separate case in which Trump was challenging a different subpoena issued by the Financial Services and Intelligence committees seeking financial records from two of his banks.

In both cases, the district courts denied his requests to block the subpoenas, and the decisions were upheld on appeal. Trump then asked the Supreme Court to review the cases.

The high court in July 2020 sent the pair of cases back to lower courts for another review because those courts hadn’t taken into account the “special concerns regarding the separation of powers.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said the lower courts should “perform a careful analysis that takes adequate account of the separation of powers principles at stake, including both the significant legislative interests of Congress and the ‘unique position’ of the President.”

The analysis should include considering whether the asserted legislative purpose justifies the need for the president’s information, whether the scope of the subpoena is limited enough so that it would still support the legislative objective, and looking at the evidence Congress has provided to “establish that a subpoena advances a valid legislative purpose,” Roberts said.

In a separate case, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. last week obtained Trump’s tax returns after the Supreme Court ruled that it wouldn’t block the release of the documents to Vance’s office. Vance had sought the documents as part of a criminal probe.