The House Oversight and Reform Committee has reissued a subpoena for former President Donald Trump’s tax and other financial records arguing it needed the documents to address “conflicts of interest” by future presidents.
In a court filing first reported by Reuters on Tuesday, House lawyers told a judge that the House Oversight Committee reissued a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm on Feb. 25.
Tuesday’s court filing included a Feb. 23 memo from committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asserting that her committee had previously been denied access to the “key information” which it needed to address ethics concerns about conflicts of interest.
“For more than 22 months, the committee has been denied key information needed to inform legislative action to address the once-in-a-generation ethics crisis created by former President Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest,” Maloney said in the memo.
According to Maloney, the call for Trump’s tax records “remains just as compelling now as it was when the Committee first issued its subpoena” in 2019 which had expired with the new Congress, in order to verify key facts and tailor legislative reforms.
Maloney said the subpoena seeks “financial records related to the committee’s investigations into presidential conflicts of interest, presidential contracts with the federal government and self-dealing, and presidential emoluments.”
With that in mind, the committee has sought eight years of accounting and other financial information from Mazars USA LLP.
The renewed call for access to Trump’s tax records comes after the Supreme Court denied a final bid by the former president to block the subpoena for his tax records by Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance’s office — ending a nearly 18-month battle for the financial documents.
The documents are a boon for Vance, whose criminal investigation into Trump and his family business has focused on potential financial crimes, in addition to hush money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women who alleged affairs with Trump.
That investigation had recently picked up steam to include sharpened focus on both the Trump Organization’s longstanding chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. who took the reins of the family business with his brother Eric, when their father was elected president in the 2016 election.
