President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department is readying a two-pronged plan to stymie an expected request by the new House Democratic majority for his personal tax returns, Politico reported on Tuesday.
Top political appointees and lawyers inside the Treasury Department have been preparing for months for the expected confrontation, according to four people familiar with the administration’s approach to the issue.
The plan is to use legal arguments to drag out the expected request for the president’s past tax filings for as long as possible, with the goal of preventing their release altogether and keeping the president’s tax records private.
The second part of the plan is to publicly depict the demand as a partisan maneuver and contend that politically motivated Democrats will then leak Trump’s tax records — which would be a felony — if the IRS provides the documents.
By this reasoning, the argument goes, since Democrats can’t be trusted to keep the documents private, they shouldn’t receive them at all.
The situation is unprecedented because presidential candidates for the past several decades have released their tax information during campaigns until Trump refused to do so.
In a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last month, 63 percent of the public said that Congress should be allowed to obtain and release the president’s tax returns.
Only 37 percent disagreed.
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