After the former president decided not to challenge an appeals court decision, the head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, made an announcement that the committee will collect financial documents from Trump.
Three years after her previous committee chairman requested them and a few weeks after she lost her own congressional primary, Maloney (D-N.Y.) hailed the breakthrough.
“I am glad that my Committee has finally struck an agreement to access important financial papers that former President Trump battled for years to keep from Congress,” she said in a statement. “After several court wins.”
Maloney published a chronology of the legal process to provide legislators a glimpse into Trump’s accounting procedures, which are also the focus of a civil probe in New York due to the length and complexity of the legal drama.
According to a subpoena, the accounting company Mazars, which managed the account for the Trump Organization, will provide papers to the House Oversight Committee.
The investigation into “extraordinary conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and foreign financial links” by the Trump Organization started in 2019 when Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s previous head, requested records from the accounting company Mazars.
When former Trump attorney Michael Cohen appeared before the committee, it became clear that the Trump Organization had inflated its values when looking for funding but had done the opposite when dealing with tax authorities.
Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, started to prioritize it.
While Trump was in the White House, he fought the subpoena, which led to a court conflict. It reached the Supreme Court, which found in 2020 7–2 that a lower court must take the relevant concerns of separation of powers into consideration and established a norm requiring a legislative interest.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the most recent subpoena satisfies this requirement.
According to Maloney’s office, ‘Under the agreement struck by the Committee, former President Trump has agreed not to further appeal the D.C. Circuit’s verdict, and Mazars USA has agreed to abide with the court’s order and submit pertinent records to the Committee as quickly as practicable.
In February, Mazars USA declared that it was severing connections with the Trump organization and that it could no longer provide ten years’ worth of financial status reports for the business.
A Justice Department probe into Trump’s removal and storage of official papers at his Florida Mar-a-Lago club has prompted him to mobilize his legal team on a new front. This is when it seems like an agreement has been reached.
On Wednesday, Trump criticized the FBI for the manner it captured images of a cache of top-secret papers discovered inside his Mar-a-Lago office.
In light of rumors that several of his attorneys may testify as fact witnesses in the case, including one who signed a paper attesting to a “diligent search” for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, he has been strengthening his legal staff.
The Trump Organization has been contacted by DailyMail.com for comment.