Former President Donald Trump has ended his long-running legal fight with two congressional committees over access to his financial records now that Republicans have a House majority.
(Bloomberg) — Former President Donald Trump has ended his long-running legal fight with two congressional committees over access to his financial records now that Republicans have a House majority.
Trump’s lawyers filed notice in court on Friday that they were dropping a lawsuit against the House Financial Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee over subpoenas to Deutsche Bank AG seeking records about Trump, his family, and his businesses.
The subpoenas were issued when Democrats controlled the House. Trump’s notice indicated that Republican leadership had not reissued those document demands to the bank.
Trump’s lawyers had spent the past year and a half in settlement talks with the House general counsel’s office. In a Dec. 28 joint status report, they told the judge that they were still negotiating and hammering out the details of a proposed written agreement. They asked for another month before returning to court with an update, and alluded to the imminent change in political power.
Absent an agreement, the case was poised to fizzle out once Republicans took control of the House as lawmakers were not expected to reissue Trump-related subpoenas. Last summer, Trump reached an agreement with the House Oversight Committee, which had also sought an array of financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. In late November, he lost a bid to stop the House Ways and Means Committee from getting his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service.
Earlier this month, Trump withdrew a lawsuit against the Ways and Means Committee that dated back to 2019, challenging a New York state law that would have given congressional Democrats a way to obtain his state tax returns. His lawyers wrote at the time that they were ending the case because Republicans had “no interest” in those records.
The latest activity in the Deutsche Bank case wraps up a legal fight that began when Trump was still in the White House. Trump’s lawyers spent years in court trying to halt efforts by Democratic lawmakers to dig into his personal financial affairs and business dealings as they pursued a range of investigations.
The Financial Services and Intelligence Committees subpoenaed years of records from Deutsche Bank in 2019 related to Trump, his immediate family members, and his businesses. US District Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan denied Trump’s request to block the subpoenas and the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that ruling.
Trump petitioned the US Supreme Court, which consolidated the Deutsche Bank and Mazars subpoena fights. In July 2020, the justices held 7-2 that the lower court judges who had repeatedly ruled against Trump in both cases had failed to fully consider the separation of powers concerns triggered by congressional demands for a president’s personal records. Each case was sent back down to the lower courts for another round of litigation.
In April 2021, Trump’s lawyers and the committees notified Ramos that they were negotiating a potential deal, and he agreed to put the Deutsche Bank case on hold, granting monthly extensions.
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