By: EFE
By: EFE
WASHINGTON – The United States Department of the Treasury received this Friday an order to deliver several tax returns from former President Donald Trump to Congress (2017 – 2021), which brings the possibility of those records being made public.
In a report , the Department of Justice determined that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that depends on the Treasury, must deliver those Trump financial records to a committee of the US House of Representatives, that requested them in 2019.
“The legal status on this matter is clear: the secretary (of the Treasury) ‘must deliver ‘Tax information requested if you receive a’ written request ‘from the chairman of one of the three Congressional committees that oversee taxes ”, wrote Dawn Johnsen , of the Office from the legal counsel of the Department of Justice.
Trump was the first president since Gerald Ford (1974 – 1977) that He did not publish his tax return every year, a tradition that his predecessors considered part of their duty of transparency and accountability to the people.
In 2017, the Democratic majority on the House Ways and Means committee asked for Trump’s tax returns corresponding to six years.
The committee wanted to obtain these documents to investigate the finances of the then president and his possible conflicts of interest, but the then Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, refused to provide them.
That struggle unleashed a litigation that is still active in the courts, but the change of position of the Depa The Court of Justice, charged with defending the government in the US courts, promises to pave the way for its resolution and for the delivery of Trump’s tax returns to Congress.
“Access to former President Trump’s tax returns is a matter of national security” said this Friday the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, in a statement.
Pelosi welcomed the decision of the Department of Justice and stressed that Americans “deserve to know the facts of the worrying conflicts of interest ”that Trump may have incurred while in office.
Since his first election campaign, Trump refused to publish his tax returns with the argument that it was subject to an audit by the IRS, although numerous legal experts assured that no rule prevented it
The Justice Department’s decision comes a year after the US Supreme Court ordered Trump to turn over his tax returns to a prosecutor investigating his finances in New York.