Democrats’ new House majority sets up fight over Trump’s tax returns

One possible target for the new House Democratic majority: the president’s tax returns.

The House Ways and Means Committee intends to request President Donald Trump’s tax returns once Democrats take majority control of the House, MSNBC’s Ari Melber reported on air Tuesday evening, citing “a senior Democratic source.”

That tracks with reports from last month, when the House Democrat now in a position to chair the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), told the Wall Street Journal that Democrats would request Trump’s tax returns if they won the majority.

As the Journal notes, Trump’s tax returns “would provide a detailed look at his finances, including the sources of income, business partners and charitable contributions.” They could shed light on questions about the Trump Foundation and Trump Organization that have been raised by damaging reporting from the Washington Post and New York Times, respectively.

Though Trump promised in 2014 that he would “absolutely” release his tax returns if he “decide[d] to run for office,” he has broken 40 years of precedent by refusing to do so on the campaign trail and steadfastly continuing to refuse to do so since becoming president.

Congress has the ability, under a law passed in 1924, to inspect tax returns from any taxpayer — including high-ranking officials. Trump, however, indicated before a campaign rally in Indiana on Monday that he may not cooperate if Democrats make moves to scrutinize his taxes.

“I don’t care,” Trump said in response to a question about if he’s concerned about Dems going after his taxes. “They can do whatever they want, and I can do whatever I want.”

During an interview last month, Trump ally and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested the fight over Trump’s taxes could ultimately wind up before the Supreme Court.

“Then they’ll be trapped into appealing to the Supreme Court, and we’ll see whether or not the [Brett] Kavanaugh [Supreme Court] fight was worth it,” Gingrich said on the topic of Democrats possibly subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns.

In an string of tweets posted Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning, Trump framed the midterm election resulted as a “Tremendous success,” a “Big Victory,” and took a victory lap about Republican gains in the Senate.

Later Wednesday morning, Trump posted another tweet threatening to use the Department of Justice as a political weapon against Democrats if they try “investigating us at the House level.”

New investigations launched by a Democratic House could be wide-ranging, from a more aggressive Russia investigation to a deeper look at US-Saudi relations. But the tax returns are an obvious target.

The current chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), has blocked previous Democratic efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns.

“As chairman of the tax-writing panel, Mr. Brady has the power to get Mr. Trump’s returns from the Internal Revenue Service and review them in closed session with other committee members,” the Journal reported in February 2017, when Brady shot down a Democratic effort to shed light on Trump’s finances. “The committee can also make the returns — or portions of them — public by submitting a report to the full House.”

As it became clear that Democrats were poised to take the House majority on Tuesday evening, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders went on Fox News and urged Dems to not “waste time” by investigating the president.

“If Democrats take the House, they shouldn’t waste time investigating — they should focus on what the people have put them there to do,” she said.

But it isn’t the case that people are uninterested in knowing more about the president’s finances, however. On the heels of the New York Times’s recent bombshell investigation alleging that Trump used tax dodges and in some cases “outright fraud” to siphon nearly a half-billion dollars from his dad’s real estate empire into his own pockets without paying appropriate taxes, a Morning Consult/Politico poll indicated that a plurality of Americans wanted Trump to make his tax returns public.

He may not end up with much of a choice.