House to quickly revive legal effort to get Trump's financial records

Source: Politico

The House is planning to quickly revisit its effort to obtain President Donald Trump’s personal financial records, urging the Supreme Court on Monday night to take its final formal steps on the matter so lawmakers can reignite the issue in the lower courts.

In a filing late Monday, the House’s top lawyer, Douglas Letter, urged the justices to immediately effectuate their July 9 ruling on the House’s subpoena for Trump’s records. Once the ruling is in force, the House can return to the U.S. District Court judge who initially heard the case and ask for renewed consideration.

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The Supreme Court ruled last week that lower courts had failed to thoroughly examine whether the House’s subpoenas for Trump’s financial records — one to his accounting firm Mazars USA, the others to Deutsche Bank and Capital One — treaded too forcefully on the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch, and whether it would be an abuse of Congress’ constitutional lawmaking power. Instead, the justices devised a four-part test to determine whether an effort by Congress to obtain the personal papers of a sitting president is proper — and they urged the lower courts to apply this test on any future attempt by lawmakers to get a president’s records from third-party companies.

But Supreme Court rulings typically don’t go into force immediately, and Letter noted that the Mazars ruling would normally take effect on Aug. 3 without the intervention of the justices. The lower courts can’t begin to take up the effort until the Supreme Court ruling takes hold, and the House is urging the justices to make that happen as quickly as possible. “The Committees have sought expedition at every stage of this litigation,” Letter wrote.

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Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/13/house-trump-financial-records-360295