This week, after a three-year legal battle, the U.S Supreme Court allowed the authorities to handover Donald Trump’s tax returns to Congress in what is Trump’s third lose at the same court this year.
“The court rejected Trump’s emergency application for an order that would have prevented the Treasury department from giving six years of tax returns for him and some of his businesses to the House Ways and Means Committee,” Samuel Osborne explains.
In 2019, the Democratic-controlled committee requested Trump’s tax returns “as part of an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s audit programme and tax law compliance by the former president.”
However, the Treasury department refused to provide the requisite documents until Joe Biden took over in January 2021. Biden’s administration has underscored that the “federal law is clear that the committee has the right to examine any taxpayer’s return, including the president’s.”
The country’s Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary freeze last November “to allow the court to weigh in on the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyer and the counterarguments of the administration and House of Representatives.”
According to Osborne, had Trump, who is America’s first president in four decades not to release his tax returns, persuaded the Supreme Court to intervene, “he could have run out the clock on the committee until the Republicans take control of the House in January, when they almost certainly would have dropped the records request had it not been resolved by then.”
