One thread in the sprawling series of mysteries around the President’s tax returns has a new shot at being resolved.
A group of media organizations are seeking to intervene in President Trump’s bid to halt subpoenas for financial records from two of his longtime banks. At the center of the effort is a letter filed under seal by Deutsche Bank last month in which the bank stated that it had records relevant to subpoenas issued by congressional committees investigating the President’s financial history.
The redacted version of that letter filed publicly hid the portion about whether the bank had returns for Trump himself, or those of his immediate family members or related entities.
Now, the news organizations are asking a Manhattan federal appeals court to unseal the unredacted version of the letter where Deutsche said whose tax returns it possesses.
Trump, through a personal attorney, sued to quash subpoenas from the House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees for years of his financial records in April. But at oral arguments before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in August, the judges directed their attention away from attorneys for Trump and the House and towards the two banks who received the subpoenas – Deutsche and Capitol One.
Judges asked attorneys for the two banks whether they had copies of Trump’s returns, but neither would say. They eventually agreed to send a letter to the appeals court saying whether they had the records.
Capitol One, which provided deposit banking services to the Trump family, told the court that it did not have the records.
But Deutsche, which is expected to have copies of Trump’s personal returns, cited extensive banking privacy concerns in its reasoning for redacting the names of the people whose returns it possesses.
“There is no genuine privacy concern implicated by Deutsche Bank confirming what is already widely understood—that it has copies of certain of the President’s or his affiliates’ financial records,” the news organizations’ court filing reads. “But it would set a disturbing precedent to allow redactions of such rudimentary facts to go unchallenged, particularly in a case involving a sitting president.”
The case is one avenue by which Congress has sought Trump’s tax returns, which he has withheld in a breach of practice from presidents dating back to Gerald Ford. The House Ways and Means Committee is currently bogged down in a lawsuit against the Trump administration, seeing to force it to comply with a request the panel made for six years of the President’s returns.
Read the motion here:
I wish everybody would stop picking on poor Donald Trump. I mean, he’s already said that no one is particularly interested in seeing his tax returns, and we know he wouldn’t lie to us. After all, he is the acting President of the United States.
And what a fine actor he is, too. If you like B-movies with has-beens in them.
Given we now know of multiple instances where US and/or foreign government money ends up in Trump’s pocket, tax returns are necessary to determine how many other ways Trump is mainlining government cash into his veins.
How crazy a conspiracy theorist am I to wonder if Justice Kennedy’s abrupt resignation was to avoid forfeiting the GOP’s majority, as a result of his recusal in Deutsche Bank cases inevitably headed for SCOTUS, by making way for a successor free of his own conflict of interest?
If you didn’t see this
Pretty much the only role he knows
Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.
His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.