The House Oversight Committee on Thursday announced in a statement that it has reached a deal with former President Donald Trump to obtain “key financial documents” from his accounting firm.
The deal, the panel said, brings an end to litigation filed by the former president to block the committee from obtaining his financial records from tax and accounting firm Mazars USA. It is unclear what documents the firm will turn over to the panel.
“After numerous court victories, I am pleased that my Committee has now reached an agreement to obtain key financial documents that former President Trump fought for years to hide from Congress,” House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said in a statement.
Trump is facing investigations on several fronts, including the storage of top-secret government information discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and whether the former president’s team criminally obstructed the inquiry. In Georgia, prosecutors are investigating whether he and allies illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, congressional committees are following through on investigations that began when he was president.
The yearslong effort by the House Oversight panel to obtain Trump’s financial records dates back to 2019, when the committee subpoenaed Mazars for the former president’s financial records dating back 10 years. The subpoena followed testimony from Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who testified that Trump “inflated his total assets when it served his purposes” and “deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”
Cohen served time in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2018 to tax crimes, lying to Congress and campaign finance violations, some of which involved his role in orchestrating payments to two women to keep them from talking about alleged affairs with Trump.
But his testimony prompted the committee to seek key financial documents from Mazars, and in April 2019, the committee issued a subpoena to Mazars seeking four targeted categories of documents.
In July, after a lengthy legal battle, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the panel can obtain some of Trump’s financial records, finding that his “financial information would advance the Committee’s consideration of ethics reform legislation across all three of its investigative tracks.”
The court said the committee should be given records pertinent to financial ties between foreign countries and Trump or any of his businesses for 2017-18.
The appeals court also ordered Mazars to turn over documents between November 2016 and 2018 relating to the Trump company that held the lease granted by the federal government for the former Trump International Hotel, located between the White House and the Capitol.
In the decision, the court said Trump’s financial records would “advance the Committee’s consideration of ethics reform legislation across all three of its investigative tracks,” including on presidential ethics and conflicts of interest, presidential financial disclosures, and presidential adherence to Constitutional safeguards against foreign interference and undue influence.
As part of the agreement, the House Oversight panel said, Trump agreed to not appeal the D.C. Circuit’s ruling and Mazars “has agreed to comply with the court’s order and produce responsive documents to the Committee as expeditiously as possible.”
“After facing years of delay tactics, the Committee has now reached an agreement with the former President and his accounting firm, Mazars USA, to obtain critical documents,” Maloney wrote. “These documents will inform the Committee’s efforts to get to the bottom of former President Trump’s egregious conduct and ensure that future presidents do not abuse their position of power for personal gain.”
The agreement appears to be unrelated to a ruling last month from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which said that House Ways and Means Committee can obtain Trump’s tax returns from the IRS.