Trump records must be given to House, says appeals court

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump, under siege from House Democrats weighing impeachment, suffered a stinging blow as a federal appeals court upheld a subpoena ordering his accountants to provide Congress with his financial records.
The ruling, by a divided three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals in Washington, means Trump will lose control of his long-secret financial records at Mazars USA LLP unless the
full court reconsiders the decision or the US Supreme Court blocks it.
In their 2-1 decision, the judges rejected arguments made by lawyers for the president that the House Oversight and Reform Committee had no legitimate legislative reason to seek the information.
“Disputes between Congress and the president are a recurring plot in our national story,” US Circuit Judge David Tatel wrote in the majority’s 66-page opinion. “And that is precisely what the Framers intended.” He quoted the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who said that the purpose of the separation of powers was “to save the people from autocracy.”
The majority opinion called the House subpoena “a valid exercise of the legislative oversight authority because it seeks information important to determining the fitness of legislation to address potential problems within the Executive Branch and the electoral system.” The court said the document demand “does not seek to determine the President’s fitness for office.”
Trump, the Trump Organization and the president’s three oldest children have steadfastly refused to surrender their records to Congress. Armed with the papers, Democratic lawmakers say, they could better explore any conflicts of interest in the executive branch and whether the president has violated the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.
“There’s a lot of speculation, but it seems that the accounting firm has tax returns and other documents that will show President Trump and his family and associates involved in all sorts of deals,” Washington lawyer David Dorsen, who served as assistant chief counsel to the US Senate’s Watergate Committee in the 1970s, said in an interview. Lawmakers will want to know whether documents show “payoffs to people in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere,” he said.
Trump’s lawyers could ask the full appeals court to consider the ruling, which might drag out the process, or go straight to the Supreme Court for an emergency review of the decision.
“We are evaluating the opinion and reviewing all options, including appeals,” said Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump.
US Circuit Court Judge Neomi Rao, who was named to the bench by Trump, dissented from the opinion by Tatel and Patricia Millett, both appointees of Democratic presidents. She said Congress can investigate allegations of illegal conduct against the president only as part of an impeachment process and not through its legislative power.
“Allowing the Committee to issue this subpoena for legislative purposes would turn Congress into a roving inquisition over a co-equal branch of government,” she wrote.
The Mazars case is one of several testing Congress’s power to obtain a sitting president’s financial records in the name of oversight. Among them, a federal appeals court in New York is weighing a similar request for records from Trump’s bankers at Capital One Financial Corp. and Deutsche Bank AG. The president is also embroiled in lawsuits with the House Ways and Means Committee, which is trying to get six years of Trump tax records from the US Internal Revenue Service.