Two Trump Family Members’ Tax Returns Are With Deutsche Bank
Bank won’t name the members despite recent showdown with judge.
(Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG said it has tax returns filed by two members of President Donald Trump’s family but declined to give their names, injecting an extra note of intrigue into a week that didn’t lack for it.
The disclosure, made in a court filing in Manhattan on Friday, comes a month after a federal judge ordered Deutsche Bank and Capital One Financial Corp. to say whether they had Trump’s returns, and three days after House Democrats began an impeachment inquiry.
“With respect to the first individual, there are a number of relevant contractual obligations related to confidentiality,” the bank said in its filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. It said those obligations don’t apply to the second set of tax records, which the court could reveal.
The impeachment inquiry was spurred by a newly disclosed whistle-blower report claiming that Trump broke the law in a conversation with the president of Ukraine. But it’s likely that other matters, such as Trump’s finances and his relationship with Russia, will also be part of the investigation.
The Deutsche Bank case began when the Democrat-led U.S. House of Representatives issued subpoenas for the financial records of several members of the Trump family, including both the president’s adult sons and his daughter Ivanka, citing the need to determine whether the Kremlin had leverage over Trump. The suit by Trump to stop the banks from complying with the subpoenas is part of a broader effort by the president to push back at House investigations as he runs for re-election next year.
During a contentious hearing in August before a three-judge panel of the appeals court, lawyers for the banks repeatedly refused to answer when asked if their clients had tax returns sought by the subpoenas.
“I’m simply not able to answer that question standing here today,” said Raphael Prober, an attorney for Deutsche Bank, citing statutes and contractual obligations to clients.
Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Trump, argued the document demand was overly broad, and transparent in its true aim.
“These subpoenas are targeting the president because he is the president,” Strawbridge told the panel, urging it to block the banks from complying because the demands have no real legislative purpose.
Trump is seeking to reverse a lower-court ruling that denied his request to block subpoenas issued by two House committees to the banks. The case is one of three testing the power of Congress to compel production of a sitting president’s financial records in the name of oversight.
In addition to the trio of cases, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is waging his own subpoena battle with the president, requesting documents from Trump’s accountants, Mazars USA LLP.
Vance is looking into whether the Trump Organization falsified business records related to hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claim to have had sexual relationships with the president. Trump has denied any such relationship.
The bank case is Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG, 19-1540, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Manhattan).
To contact the reporter on this story: Gerald Porter Jr. in New York at gporter30@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey, Joe Schneider
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