House Dems urge Supreme Court to allow subpoena for Trump’s financial records

Lawyers for the House Oversight and Reform Committee asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to obtain eight years of President Trump‘s financial records following a series of court victories upholding their subpoena for the documents.

Trump’s personal attorneys had filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court for a stay of the subpoena last week after an appellate court ruled that the president’s accounting firm would have to comply with the House Democrats’ request.

The House panel’s lawyers wrote on Thursday that the subpoena case does not merit Supreme Court review given the lack of conflict in judicial opinions on the issue. They also argued that the Supreme Court is not the proper venue for the president to challenge potential financial disclosure laws that lawmakers are considering.

“If the President believes financial disclosure laws are unconstitutional as applied to him, he could challenge those existing laws or veto new bills passed by Congress,” the filing reads.

The court has not yet decided whether it will hear the case. If they do decide to take up Trump’s appeal, it will be the first time the court has waded into the president’s many fights with the House over his broad claims of immunity from investigation.

Trump also asked the Supreme Court last week to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other financial records from the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

The House brief also said that if the court does decide to take up Trump’s challenge, it should consider it on an expedited basis in order to deliver a decision before its term ends in June.

“The House’s rapidly advancing impeachment inquiry also makes it particularly important that Congress not be deprived of the information sought by the subpoena,” the committee wrote.

“It matters little that the Committee did not originally seek the information in question pursuant to the House’s impeachment power. Now that the House is exercising its grave constitutional responsibilities under that power, it should be fully informed with all the information to which it is entitled—including information it had previously sought for legislative purposes,” they wrote.

Trump’s legal team argued last week that the lower courts’ decisions upholding the House subpoena set an unacceptable precedent.

“For the first time in our nation’s history, Congress has subpoenaed the personal records of a sitting president from before he was in office,” Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow said in a statement last week. “And, for the first time in our nation’s history, a court upheld a congressional subpoena to the president for his personal papers. Those decisions are wrong and should be reversed.”

Chief Justice John Roberts granted the president an administrative stay of the lower court’s decision to allow for the House to respond and for the court to decide whether to take the case.

It’s unclear when the court will decide whether to move forward with the case, but the justices could reasonably decide as early as Friday.

Updated at 3:25 p.m.