Mnuchin Says He Isn’t Afraid of Getting Fired Over Trump’s Tax Returns
Trump has said his returns are under audit and that he doesn’t intend to turn anything over until that is finished.
(Bloomberg) -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he’s not worried about being fired if he releases President Donald Trump’s tax returns to congressional Democrats, and that their request is under review.
“I’m not afraid of being fired at all,” he told House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, at a hearing on Tuesday afternoon. “Having said that, I’ve said we will follow the law.”
House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts has requested six years of Trump’s personal returns as well as those for several of the president’s business entities, citing a law that allows the chairmen of congressional tax-writing committees to request any filer’s returns.
Several members of the administration, including acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, have called the request a political attack and a violation of Trump’s privacy and have vowed to fight it.
Mnuchin, however, said it would be “premature at this point to make any specific comments. It is being reviewed by the legal department and we look forward to responding to the letter.”
Neal set a deadline of Wednesday for Treasury to respond to the request.
Earlier in the day, Mnuchin told a House Appropriations subcommittee that he has not spoken to Trump or Mulvaney about the request but acknowledged that Treasury Department lawyers had discussed the issue with the White House counsel’s office before the request was made.
“I want to be very clear and not be misleading. I acknowledge that there were conversations and I have not been briefed on the communications,” Mnuchin said. He did not elaborate.
Later, before the same panel, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig said that “to his knowledge” no one at the White House had communicated with his agency about the president’s returns.
Asked by reporters at the Capitol if Treasury would meet the deadline, Mnuchin said, “In general, we try to accommodate these requests. I’m not going to make a specific comment on that, but it would be a good guess.”
Rettig said the ultimate decision to give the House Trump’s returns “is mine, with the supervision of Treasury.”
Neal last week asked Rettig to hand over the documents. He said the committee needed the returns as part of its oversight duties to make sure the IRS is properly auditing the president. Yet Democrats have long wanted Trump’s tax returns to see what foreign financial dealings he may have, whether he always followed the law, and if he benefited from the 2017 Republican tax overhaul.
The request is likely to become a protracted legal battle. William Consovoy, one of Trump’s lawyers, has advised the IRS and Treasury Department to refuse the request until a legal opinion can be issued. If the department refused to hand them over, Democrats would likely sue. And if the request ends up in the courts, the issue could linger unresolved until after the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has said his returns are under audit and that he doesn’t intend to turn anything over until that is finished. Under questioning on Tuesday, Rettig said that he is unaware of any prohibition against a taxpayer releasing his returns even if they are under audit.
Federal law allows the Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees and the Joint Committee on Taxation to ask the IRS for the returns of any filer, but some legal scholars say a request requires Congress to have a legislative purpose, including general oversight. The committees could then vote to make those documents public.
Mnuchin told the Ways and Means Committee in March that he’d follow the law if the committee requested the returns. But he added, “We will protect the president as we would protect any individual taxpayer under their rights.”
Senior Republicans, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Kevin Brady, the ranking GOP member on House Ways and Means, have said Democrats are using the tax code to go after a political foe.
Congress released private tax information during the Watergate scandal involving President Richard Nixon and during the more recent allegations that the IRS targeted Tea Party groups during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Trump broke with 40 years of presidential campaign tradition in refusing to release his personal tax returns before he was elected.
“The general public, when they elected President Trump, made the decision without his tax returns being released,” Mnuchin said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Saleha Mohsin in Washington at smohsin2@bloomberg.net;Laura Davison in Washington at ldavison4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Alex Wayne, John Harney
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