US Markets
Thursday, September 1st, 2022 11:19 am EDT
Ex-President Donald Trump and his former longtime accounting firm have agreed to turn over some financial records to the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a deal that will end a lawsuit over their prior refusal to do so, that panel and Trump’s lawyers said.
But details of how many of those records the Mazars USA accounting firm will turn over were not included in a committee statement announcing the agreement Thursday.
The deal does not cover a separate lawsuit involving the House Ways and Means Committee, which is seeking Trump’s federal tax returns from 2015 through 2020.
Last month, a federal appeals court said the Ways and Means Committee could get those returns.
The agreement with the Oversight Committee came nearly two months after another panel of judges in the same appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld a prior ruling that the Oversight Committee had the authority to subpoena certain of Trump’s financial records from Mazars in furtherance of legislative purposes.
However, the appeals court also told the committee to winnow the scope of the records it wanted to see.
On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers told the court in a filing that in light of the settlement agreement with the Oversight Committee, he would drop a motion seeking a rehearing of the case, and a related one asking that the entire lineup of judges on the appeals court take up the issue.
In a statement, committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said, “After facing years of delay tactics, the Committee has now reached an agreement with the former President and his accounting firm, Mazars USA, to obtain critical documents.”
“These documents will inform the Committee’s efforts to get to the bottom of former President Trump’s egregious conduct and ensure that future presidents do not abuse their position of power for personal gain,” Maloney said.
The committee said that under the agreement, “Mazars USA has agreed to comply with the court’s order and produce responsive documents to the Committee as expeditiously as possible.”
A lawyer for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The committee sought the documents in 2019 as part of its investigation into Trump’s conflicts of interest involving his businesses while serving as president and his foreign financial ties.
The panel issued its subpoena to Mazars for Trump’s records after his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to the Oversight Committee that Trump’s financial statements had falsely represented his financial position.
Trump then sued to block Mazars from surrendering the records.
The case ended up before the Supreme Court, which in 2020 sent the lawsuit back to lower federal courts with the direction to apply a new standard for evaluating the merit of congressional subpoenas for a president’s personal information.
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