It’s not as if the United States has never had a president who broke the law. Richard Nixon most certainly did, and he was forced to resign in order to avoid the embarrassment of impeachment. Bill Clinton did and was impeached, although his impeachment was overturned in the Senate.
But Donald Trump is doing something no president has ever done before. He’s simply denying Congress the right to perform their constitutional duty to perform oversight of the executive branch, and doing it openly and proudly.
The Treasury Department has consulted Justice Department and concluded the House panel “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” for the request, Mnuchin said. https://t.co/xN92o9XBOT pic.twitter.com/NDD8lRvkRV
— Bloomberg Tax (@tax) May 17, 2019
This is the long-game strategy, and would likely take months, if not years, straight through the 2020 presidential election.
Neal has indicated he would would rather go straight to court than hold Mnuchin in contempt of Congress.
Follow @allyversprille for more on this story.
— Bloomberg Tax (@tax) May 17, 2019
On Friday, the White House was given a deadline to turn over copies of Donald Trump’s tax returns for a number of reasons. One is an investigation into allegations that Trump committed tax fraud, a claim made by his former attorney and “fixer,” Michael Cohen. Cohen said during congressional testimony that Trump often overstated the value of his real estate properties publicly in order to make himself appear more wealthy than he is, but undervalued them on tax returns to avoid paying taxes. This claim was borne out when 10 years of Trump’s tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s proved that Trump so often claimed massive losses for his businesses that he didn’t pay a penny in taxes for many years.
The other is the ongoing investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. After saying repeatedly that he had no business deals with Russia during the 2016 campaigns, Cohen’s testimony and the backing documents he brought to Congress as proof showed that this was also untrue. Not only did Trump have plans to build a Trump Tower Moscow throughout the 2016 elections, his family and top people in his company, the Trump Organization, were well aware of it.
When the deadline came for Mnuchin to turn over those tax reports, he declared that Congress did not have a legitimate legislative purpose in requesting the documents and simply refused to turn them over.
Twitter knew exactly how to respond to Mnuchin’s defiance. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image screenshot via YouTube
