Attorneys for President Trump are urging an accounting firm not to comply with a House Oversight and Reform Committee subpoena for a decade of his financial records, according to Politico.
Two of Trump’s attorneys, Stefan Passantino and William Consovoy, have told Mazars USA to defy the subpoena, which committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) is set to issue Monday, according to the report.
{mosads}“It is no secret that the Democrat Party has decided to use its new House majority to launch a flood of investigations into the president’s personal affairs in hopes of using anything they can find to damage him politically,” Consovoy and Passantino wrote to Mazars outside counsel Jerry Bernstein, Politico reported.
The lawyers warned Mazars they were putting the firm “on notice” for potential legal action and urged it not to provide any of the documents Cummings requested before the subpoena has been litigated in court.
“[T]he House Oversight Committee is not a miniature Department of Justice, charged with investigating and prosecuting potential federal crimes. It is a legislative body, not ‘a law enforcement or trial agency,’ and the chairman’s attempt to assume for Congress the role of police, prosecutor, and judge is unconstitutional,” the attorneys added.
Cummings first requested the documents in March in response to testimony from Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen claiming that Trump had manipulated his net worth for “potentially improper purposes.” Mazars asked Cummings for a so-called friendly subpoena before they provided the information.
Consovoy and Passantino’s rhetoric around the request echoes that of Republican Oversight members Reps. Mark Meadows (N.C.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio), two of Trump’s most consistent allies in the House, who have said Cummings’s requests are “solely to embarrass President Trump and to advance the relentless Democrat attacks upon the Trump administration.”