Executive Branch

Supreme Court Filings in Trump Tax Disclosure Case

Hadley Baker
Thursday, November 10, 2022, 1:51 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
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In a Nov. 10 filing, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to deny former President Donald Trump’s Oct. 31 motion to stay a court order that would require him to give years of his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. Trump’s filing represented the latest salvo in the former president’s long-running effort to block the committee from obtaining his taxes, tracing back to 2019, when the committee first sought this information. In Trump’s filing, his lawyers argued that, if allowed to stand, the decision would “undermine the separation of powers and render the office of the Presidency vulnerable to invasive information demands from political opponents in the legislative branch.” The Justice Department filing, on behalf of the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, refuted this point, saying that the request for the tax returns “furthers a valid legislative purpose and comports with the separation of powers.”

The DOJ filing comes after Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the Ways and Means Committee from gaining access to the tax returns while the Court considered Trump’s stay application, requiring the Committee to respond by Nov. 10. You can read the Justice Department filing here and Trump’s filing here. You can also read both below.

DOJ filing:

Trump motion:


Hadley Baker was an Assistant Editor of Lawfare. She is a recent graduate from the University of St Andrews, studying English literature and Spanish. She was previously an intern at Lawfare.

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