WASHINGTON U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal and the House Ways and Means Committee could decide Tuesday to make Donald Trumps taxes public as Neals time as chairman draws to a close.
Neal, D-Springfield, fought a four-year court battle with the former president to get access to the taxes. Neal won a Supreme Court decision Nov. 22. Since then, he and his staff have had access to six years of tax records, records Trump refused to make public in his campaigns as every other candidate since Richard Nixon has done.
Neal has made the records available to the ranking Republican on the committee, Kevin Brady, R-Texas, according to published reports.
But time is short with a new, and very slight, Republican majority taking over the House Jan. 3. Neal and his fellow Democrats must move. Federal law calls for the tax records to be kept confidential. But by reporting them out to the full House, it would be lawful to make them public, according to published reports out of Washington Friday afternoon.
Neal posted a notice on Friday of 3 p.m. Tuesday closed-door meeting in consideration of documents protected under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103, the law that protects the documents. There is expected to be a vote on whether to release some data from Trumps tax returns from 2015 to 2020, including the possibility of sharing the filings. The panel obtained the information from the Treasury Department last month.
Such a vote, which Republicans are likely to oppose, would be the culmination of a nearly four-year battle stemming from Trumps decision to break with modern precedent and refuse to disclose his personal financial information as a presidential candidate and then as a sitting president.
Nearly four years ago, the Ways and Means Committee set out to fulfill our legislative and oversight responsibilities, and evaluate the Internal Revenue Services mandatory audit program, Neal said in a statement to the New York Times. As affirmed by the Supreme Court, the law was on our side, and on Tuesday, I will update the members of the committee.
Lawyers for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Neal has been reluctant to discuss the legal battle in detail. At stake, he said, is the Houses oversight role monitoring the White House and the federal government, a concept that stretches back to English common law and the Magna Carta.
The New York Times acquired two decades of Trump tax data in 2020. He paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years. The Times said Trump also reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that, as of 2020, was the subject of an IRS audit.
Still, the returns the committee has obtained contain more recent data.
Neal first sought Trumps tax returns in 2019, after Democrats took over the House in the 2018 midterm elections and began trying to perform oversight of the Trump administration.
The Ways and Means Committee said it needed the records to assess an IRS program that audits presidents. Trumps lawyers said that was a pretext for a politically motivated fishing expedition, accusing the panel of lacking any legitimate legislative purpose.
Trump had vowed to stonewall all Democratic subpoenas, and his administration instructed the IRS, part of the Treasury Department, not to comply with the request. Once the committee filed a lawsuit seeking to enforce its request, Trumps lawyers promised to fight it tooth and nail.
The case was assigned to a Trump appointee, Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who did not make any ruling for several years, enabling Trump to run out the clock before the 2020 election.
After the Biden administration took office, the Justice Department said that Congress had a legal right to the information it was seeking. At the end of 2021, McFadden finally ruled, agreeing that the law was on the side of the Ways and Means Committee but warning that he believed it would be a bad idea to make Trumps returns public.
An appeals court upheld McFaddens decision. Last month, the Supreme Court declined Trumps request that it temporarily block the Treasury Department from turning over the material while he litigated an appeal before it.
Material from the New York Times was included in this report.