WASHINGTON — A House of Representatives committee has been granted access to six years of former President Donald J. Trump’s tax returns after the Supreme Court last week cleared the way for the release of documents he had long sought to keep secret.
“The Treasury Department has complied with last week’s court decision,” Lily Adams, a Treasury Department spokeswoman, said Wednesday.
The move ended a nearly four-year effort by Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee to obtain the proceeds. Trump broke with modern precedent for major presidential candidates and sitting presidents and had refused to make them public.
A spokesperson for the chairman of the committee requesting the refund, Massachusetts Democrat Representative Richard E. Neal, declined to comment. Attorneys for Mr Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
It was unclear whether the Internal Revenue Service, an agency within the Treasury Department, had provided physical copies of the returns to Capitol Hill, offered to make them available for Mr. to provide to the committee.
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Ms Adams also gave no further details, saying only that the department had provided the data “in accordance with 6103 guidelines”, referring to the law allowing the chair of the Ways and Means Committee to request the returns.
At this stage, Section 6103 requires the confidentiality of details about all filed returns that may be associated with a particular taxpayer. However, that same law also allows the commission to later publish the returns in the Congressional Record, making them public. Mr. Neal has not announced whether he will.
The move came about a month before Republicans took control of the House. Had the Supreme Court sided with Trump, the new majority would almost certainly have dropped the request.
It’s not clear whether the tax return will contain significant new revelations, as details about Mr. Trump’s finances have been revealed in other ways in the intervening years.
In February 2021, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office obtained some of Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial records. The Trump Organization is now in New York, where it faces charges of tax fraud and other crimes. The Attorney General of the State of New York has sued Mr. Trump and three of his childrenaccusing them of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets.
The New York Times has that too examined Mr. Trump’s taxesincluding obtaining tax return data in 2020. One of the findings was that he paid no federal income tax in 11 of the 18 years The Times investigated and that he had reduced his tax bill with a $72.9 million tax refund that was subject to an audit by the IRS as of 2020
The battle over Mr. Trump’s taxes dates back to 2019, when Democrats took over the House and began trying to oversee it. Mr Trump vowed to block “all” of their subpoenas and pursued a strategy of using the slow pace of litigation to delay such efforts.
Among other things, the Democrats obtained testimony from Mr. Trump’s former attorney, Michael D. Cohen, that Mr. Trump boasted about inflating asset values in applying for loans and undervaluing them when it helped lower his taxes. Mr Neal also asked for Mr Trump’s tax returns and said the committee was studying a program that monitors presidents.
Mr Trump and his allies said the Democrats were engaged in a politically motivated fishing expedition, and his lawyers vowed to fight it “tooth and nail”. The Trump administration did not allow the Treasury Department to comply with Mr Neal’s request.
The House filed a lawsuit in July to enforce the request, but the lawsuit stalled before a Trump-appointed judge, Trevor N. McFadden. In late 2021, he finally ruled that the law was on the side of the committee — even though he warned he thought it would be a bad idea for the House to publish the returns.
Mr. Trump continued to appeal. Last summer, a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld Judge McFadden’s ruling.
In October, the full appeals court declined to hear the case again, and last week the Supreme Court refused to participate — lifting the blockade that prevented the commission from obtaining the proceeds.