The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has made over six years of former President Donald Trump’s federal income tax returns available to a Democrat-controlled congressional committee.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s effort to block the House Ways and Means Committee from gaining access to the records, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The Treasury Department, which contains the IRS, “has complied with last week’s court decision,” a department spokesperson said on Wednesday.
The House Ways and Means Committee first requested Trump’s tax returns in 2019 to investigate an IRS audit into the former president.
Steven Mnuchin, then-Treasury secretary, withheld the tax returns from the committee, arguing that they were sought after for purely partisan reasons.
The committee filed a lawsuit, seeking to obtain the records, and the Treasury Department stopped resisting the committee when President Joe Biden took office.
Trump then filed a lawsuit to block the records’ release.
The former president’s effort failed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Trevor N. McFadden dismissed the case in December 2021 and allowed for the returns to be released to the committee.
Trump’s lawyers then filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled 3–0 in August 2022 that the former president must release his tax returns to the committee.
The court said the committee had both a legal right to obtain the records and a legitimate legislative purpose for the request.
On November 1, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the committee from accessing the records to give the Supreme Court time to consider the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyers and the counterarguments made by the Biden administration and House Democrats.
The court lifted Roberts’ order without comment on November 22, clearing the way for the House Ways and Means Committee to access six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns, with only one more month before Republicans take control of the House.
