As ex-President Donald Trump’s legal problems accumulate, the House Oversight Committee has reissued their previous subpoena for his tax returns. The subpoena targets Trump’s longtime accounting firm Mazars USA, and the committee appears to have reissued its demand for the records the day after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing the release of Trump’s tax returns to Manhattan prosecutors at the office of District Attorney Cy Vance, whose team is conducting a criminal investigation of the Trump family business.
In a February 23 memo, House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) commented as follows:
‘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. The committee’s need for this information — in order to verify key facts and tailor legislative reforms to be as effective and efficient as possible — remains just as compelling now as it was when the committee first issued its subpoena, and the committee’s legislative efforts remain just as critical to the American people as they were before President Trump vacated the White House on January 20, 2021.’
Maloney also indicated that the subpoena would target “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.”
Throughout Trump’s time in office, he refused to financially detach himself from his business operations, meaning that interests hoping to gain favor with the then-president could patronize one of his businesses and directly financially support the commander-in-chief of the United States. Underscoring this problem, only recently — in the wake of Trump’s departure from the White House — did business at the Trump Organization’s D.C. hotel slow down considerably. Last month, CNN reported that they found scenes at the D.C. hotel including a “sprawling lobby and bar with only a handful of people,” “Confused guests asking where everybody went,” and “Elegant, but empty hallways.”
At the Supreme Court, Trump twice sought protection from the enforcement of the Vance subpoena, but both times, he failed. His team alleged that the New York investigation is overreaching, but the court clearly didn’t agree to the point of blocking the subpoena.
