Judge Sets June Hearing in Trump's Effort to Keep Tax Returns Private From House Democrats

A federal judge on Thursday set a hearing date to allow attorneys to present oral arguments over whether former President Donald Trump’s financial records should be handed over to the House Oversight Committee.

This comes after attorneys for each party in the case informed U. S District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta that the Democrat-controlled House panel had reissued a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA to hand over eight years of financial records involving the former president and his businesses.

Following a hearing on Thursday, Mehta set dates for legal briefs and a June 18 hearing date for oral arguments. The case now is likely to focus on whether a Supreme Court legal test that required the lower courts to “perform a careful analysis” on separation of powers issues would still apply now that Trump is no longer in office.

During the hearing, Mehta asked the parties whether the Supreme Court ruling from 2020 was still relevant, according to the Washington Examiner. Trump lawyers argued that the separation of powers issues remain, while House lawyers say a lower standard for the subpoena enforcement should now be applied since Trump is no longer president.

The case could possibly return to the Supreme Court for another review now that circumstances have changed.

Trump’s lawyers did not respond to The Epoch Times’ previous request to comment on the subpoena.

The case went through months of litigation before it arrived at the Supreme Court in 2020. It was combined with a separate case in which Trump was challenging a different subpoena issued by the Financial Services and Intelligence committees seeking financial records from two of his banks.

In both cases, the district courts denied his requests to block the subpoenas, and the decisions were upheld on appeal. Trump then asked the Supreme Court to review the cases.

The high court in July 2020 sent the pair of cases back to lower courts for another review because those courts hadn’t taken into account the “special concerns regarding the separation of powers.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said the lower courts should “perform a careful analysis that takes adequate account of t... (Read more)

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