New York’s legislature approved a bill Wednesday that would give Congress access to President Trump’s state tax returns, setting up a backdoor method for Democrats to get hold of information Mr. Trump has refused to release.
The move, one of several steps the heavily Democratic state has taken to tweak the GOP president, comes as the Treasury Department in Washington explained to Congress why it’s defying a subpoena for Mr. Trump’s taxes.
Both the New York Senate and Assembly voted Wednesday to approve the tax legislation.
It doesn’t name Mr. Trump, but it applies to top elected and appointed officials — and is clearly aimed at the president, who filed taxes in the state, and who has myriad business entities in the state.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signaled support for the legislation in the abstract, though a spokesman said he’ll review the bill carefully, The Associated Press reported.
Though there is no law that requires a president to make his taxes public, for decades it’s been standard practice. Mr. Trump defied that.
Democrats, saying there’s unsettling information in the returns, have made it a mission to expose them.
House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal has subpoenaed six years of returns from Mr. Trump and some of his businesses. The Treasury Department has defied that subpoena, with Secretary Steven Mnuchin arguing the request is not legitimate.
He told the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday that he would be breaking the law if he did release the returns to Congress.
“I have been advised I am not violating the law,” the secretary said. “I have been advised that had I turned them over, I would be violating the law.”
Democrats are furious at the Treasury Department and IRS, saying the law clearly gives chairmen of several committees, including Ways and Means, the power to demand anyone’s tax returns. The law says the department “shall” provide them.
Mr. Mnuchin, though, says court decisions have circumscribed Congress’s investigative powers, limiting them to areas where there’s a legitimate legislative purpose. He says there isn’t one in the demand to see the president’s taxes.
Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal says he wants to see the president’s records so he can determine whether the IRS is following through on its own guidelines that call for the president’s taxes to be audited every year.
Mr. Mnuchin has said he’s willing to brief the committee on those guidelines and the IRS’s compliance, but says that can be done without turning over a taxpayer’s private information.
Both sides appear headed for court.
A court ruling in another case this week gave Mr. Neal a boost. In that case, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Congress has broad latitude to decide what it wants to investigate.
Democrats at the committee hearing Wednesday grilled Mr. Mnuchin over an IRS legal memo, first reported by The Washington Post, that suggested the IRS was constrained in its discretion to thwart Mr. Neal’s request.
Mr. Mnuchin said he never saw the memo and is trying to find out who wrote it.
But he said it doesn’t match the legal advice he got from his own lawyers and from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
“The memo was marked draft. It was not a final memo. But I don’t know how it got to The Washington Post. It would have been more interesting if it had gotten to me or the commissioner to review,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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