Former President Donald Trump's lawyers are now arguing that a House committee's request to obtain six years of Trump's tax returns should be blocked, stating that the effort is politically motivated and illegitimate, the New York Times reported.
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In the 37-page filing, the former president's legal team argued that the Trump-era Justice Department had already put forward a bid to stop the congressional request. Still, now the Biden-era Justice Department abandoned it last week, saying the Treasury Department was legally obligated to provide documents to lawmakers.
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The legal team wrote that a request for a former president's tax returns is "unlawful and unenforceable because they lack a legitimate legislative purpose, exceed statutory authority, violate the First Amendment, violate due process, and/or violate the separation of powers."
This lawsuit dates back to when Trump was still president and is formally a case between the House Ways and Means Committee and the Treasury Department.
However, now that the executive branch has dropped its resistance to complying with the request, Trump's legal team is working as intervenors and asking for an injunction blocking that step.
The filing's main argument is that even though he is no longer sitting president, the case must still be evaluated as if he were in office since it dates back to that period. Trump broke the norm of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns, and much of the filing reprised statements made by Democrats date back to the 2016 campaign.
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, led by Dawn Johnson, has stated the need for the executive branch to accept the committee's stated purpose for its reason for seeking the returns.
"Even if some individual members of Congress hope to see information from the former president's tax returns disclosed on the public record merely 'for the sake of exposure,'" she wrote, "that would not invalidate the legitimate objectives that the committee's receipt of the information in question could serve."
The judge overseeing the lawsuit, Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, is being asked by Trump's legal team to rule otherwise.
At the moment, the returns will not be received by Congress anytime soon as the decision is still up in the air.
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