Trump lawyer attacks Democrats’ bid for tax returns

A lawyer for President Donald Trump renewed his criticism of House Democrats’ bid to seize the president’s tax returns, telling the Treasury Department that they’ve offered no good reason to obtain the documents.

William Consovoy attacked Democrats’ arguments that they need Trump’s confidential filings so they can vet the IRS’s audits of the president.

“No one actually believes this,” Consovoy wrote Brent McIntosh, general counsel at Treasury.

What’s more, he said, it’s not Congress’s job to second-guess the agency’s examinations of individual taxpayers.

“Congress has no constitutional authority to act like a junior-varsity IRS, rerunning individual examinations or flyspecking the agency’s calculations,” Consovoy wrote.

The letter comes days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) set a new April 23 deadline for the administration to hand over the filings.

A Neal spokesperson declined today to comment.

Neal is citing a nearly century-old law that allows the heads of Congress’s tax committees to examine anyone’s returns. Democrats are trying to use the law to obtain Trump’s returns, which he has steadfastly refused to release despite a decades-old tradition of presidents and White House contenders voluntarily releasing their filings.

Neal, who is demanding six year’s worth of Trump’s personal and some of his business returns, says he needs them to examine how rigorously the IRS is implementing its longstanding policy of audting every president.

Republicans scoff at that, saying Democrats just want to search Trump’s filings for revelations they can use to embarrass him.

Neal had initially set an April 10 deadline, which Treasury missed, saying it needed more time to study the issue.

Consovoy initially wrote Treasury on April 5, urging the agency to deny the request.

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/trump-lawyer-tax-returns-1276263
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