Despite his countless legal maneuvers to keep it from happening, failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump now has to watch as his financial records are handed over to congressional Democrats, a development which must have him seething.
According to The New York Times, Mazars USA has given the records to a key House committee:
“After a yearslong legal fight, the House Oversight Committee has received a first trove of documents from the firm, which recently entered into a legal settlement agreeing to produce a range of financial documents from several years before Mr. Trump took office and during his early presidency. Mazars said in February it could no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial statements it had prepared for the Trump Organization.”
The chair of the committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) confirmed that Mazars was indeed cooperating and providing documents:
“We’re reviewing them. Mazars is being very cooperative.”
Maloney also noted that her committee was the only one in Congress to obtain any of the Mazars documents.
The Times also notes that news of the document handover has been a long time coming:
“The Oversight Committee has been in a lengthy struggle to obtain financial documents from Mr. Trump as part of its investigation into allegations of conflicts of interest, inadequate financial disclosures and violations of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution, which bar the president from receiving profits from a domestic or foreign government other than his official compensation. In 2019, Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, testified before the committee that Mr. Trump’s financial statements had falsely represented the former president’s assets and liabilities and that Mr. Trump had ‘inflated his total assets when it served his purposes’ and, at other times, ‘deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.'”
The agreement between Mazars and the Oversight Committee specifies “that Mazars must turn over any documents between 2014 and 2018 that indicate any false or undisclosed information about Mr. Trump’s assets, income or liabilities; communications related to any potential concerns that financial information provided by Mr. Trump’s companies was inaccurate; documents from November 2016 to 2018 related to the Old Post Office Building, a federal property in Washington that Mr. Trump’s company converted into a hotel through a lease deal; and documents from 2017 and 2018 related to relationships between Mr. Trump’s businesses and foreign states.”