Judge puts new hold on Democrats’ lawsuit seeking Trump tax returns

A federal judge on Friday issued a stay of House Democrats’ lawsuit aimed at obtaining President Trump’s tax returns, after an appeals court agreed to rehear a different case that touches on some of the same legal issues.

Judge Trevor McFadden, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., and a Trump appointee, said in a court filing that the tax-return case is on hold “pending further order of this Court.”

McFadden had initially put the case on hold in January, until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in a separate lawsuit over House Democrats’ subpoena of former White House counsel Don McGahn. Late last month, a three-judge panel for the appeals court issued an opinion finding that House Democrats didn’t have standing to sue to enforce the McGahn subpoena.

House Democrats asked the full D.C. Circuit to rehear the McGahn case, and the court has agreed to do so.

The House’s tax-return lawsuit includes one count stemming from Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal’s (D-Mass.) subpoenas to the Treasury Department and IRS for Trump’s tax returns, and seven counts stemming from Neal’s request for the tax returns under a section of the federal tax code.

At a hearing earlier this month, McFadden asked Democrats if they would be willing to drop their subpoena enforcement claim in light of the three-judge ruling in the McGahn case, and instead just focus on their other claims. In a document filed after the hearing, House lawyers said that they wanted to push forward on both claims involving subpoena enforcement and the tax code section.

McFadden had signaled that he planned to stay the tax-return case if Democrats still wanted to move forward with their subpoena-enforcement claim, and he proceeded to do so on Friday.