Lawyers for Donald Trump on Wednesday urged a federal judge to block the Treasury Department from handing his tax returns over to the House Ways and Means Committee.
The committee’s stated reason for seeing the returns, to examine how the IRS audits presidents, is simply a pretext for wanting to look for something embarrassing, they said.
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“While House Democrats had offered countless justifications for obtaining the president’s tax returns, no one at the time had ever mentioned a desire to find out how the IRS audits presidents,” they said in their court filing. “The chairman’s request bore little resemblance to an effort to investigate how the IRS audits presidents. It asked for the information of only one president, asked for open files for which audits have not been completed, and never asked the IRS for the most relevant information — namely, how it audits presidents.”