The Treasury Department, with its Monday announcement that it would not comply with a demand from House Democrats to release President Trump’s tax returns to Congress, has set up a battle that will now go to the courts to be settled.
President Trump has already filed a novel lawsuit to block his own accounting firm from complying with a congressional subpoena for financial records. Whatever the case or lack thereof to Mr. Trump’s suit, he deserves his day in court, just as any plaintiff would.
But the American people deserve that day to come quickly, given the obvious stakes for Mr. Trump’s re-election bid in 2020. For a court to be conscious of timing isn’t a political act — it’s simply responsible. We had firsthand experience at the White House dealing with the 2016 election’s most politically explosive litigation: the review and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails. A federal judge, conscious of the election implications, moved that litigation at breakneck speed. The same urgency should apply in Mr. Trump’s case.
It’s important to understand what Mr. Trump’s suit is about. After the Treasury Department ignored a deadline for providing the House House Ways and Means Committee with the president’s tax returns as a federal law appears to require, the committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm seeking his financial records. Mr. Trump acted quickly to prevent the firm from complying: He sued his own firm as well as the committee chair, arguing that the former is legally barred from cooperating with the latter. It’s now up to a federal judge to manage the case, which seems designed to delay any release of Mr. Trump’s records until after Election Day 2020.
Delay is itself a win for Mr. Trump and fits into his broader strategy of trying to avoid oversight and scrutiny — not only by filing this lawsuit but also by resisting other congressional subpoenas and, most recently, speaking out against congressional testimony by Robert Mueller that even Attorney General Bill Barr had publicly accepted.
Whatever the outcome of Mr. Trump’s legal argument, we urge the judge to move on the merits quickly. The issue appears to be straightforward. There are no privileges involved, and Mr. Trump’s major argument seems to be that Congress lacks the authority to investigate him. In our view, the case could be resolved by the district court within weeks, not months. The same rationale applies to the other subpoena litigation that is or will shortly be pending in the district courts, and it applies to Congress’s own efforts to obtain subpoenaed materials and secure witnesses for testimony. “Delay Till After 2020” should not be allowed to thwart legitimate oversight.
If Congress and ultimately the American people are to see Mr. Trump’s financial records, they should see them as soon as possible, as American voters are already considering whether they want to give the president four more years. Moving forward the litigation so that it’s resolved, one way or the other, soon or certainly well ahead of Election Day is a matter of judicial responsibility.
That’s exactly how a federal judge handled the litigation surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s emails in the 2016 campaign. When it emerged that she had used a private email address and server to conduct official business as secretary of state, it became clear that documents previously provided to the public in response to requests for State Department records hadn’t included the privately held emails. Consequently, some people who had made those previous requests went to court demanding that the privately held emails be released — quickly.
The federal judge overseeing the litigation agreed, rejecting the State Department’s proposed timeline for reviewing and releasing the emails and ordering the government to accelerate. He didn’t need to say out loud what everyone knew: Voters were assessing Mrs. Clinton’s fitness for office, and these emails could inform that assessment. It was obvious that the litigation should move swiftly and, in particular, should yield public releases of the emails before Election Day. It was a sense of the undeniable stakes of moving quickly when the litigation had such clear bearing on a coming presidential election.
For us, the judge’s sense of urgency was hardly good news. We were both serving at the White House then, one as White House counsel, the other as a national security lawyer. The judge’s insistence on a more aggressive timeline than the one our colleagues had proposed for reviewing and releasing Mrs. Clinton’s emails meant that lawyers across the government had to spend literally sleepless nights reviewing at a frantic pace thousands of pages of emails to determine which portions should be released (a vast majority) and which portions should be redacted to protect, for example, individuals’ privacy or executive privilege.
But the judge’s demand for speed was the right thing to do. There was no sense in having Mrs. Clinton’s emails come out after the American people had cast their votes for or against her. That was the voters’ choice to make, and they were entitled to do so based on the full insight into her tenure as secretary of state that the Freedom of Information Act allowed. The judge’s dogged pace simply — and responsibly — facilitated an informed choice.
We don’t know what the judge will say about Mr. Trump’s arguments for why his accounting firm shouldn’t respond to the congressional subpoena — bold arguments that would prevent one branch of government from scrutinizing another, as the recent intervention in the case by the House of Representatives underscores. And we don’t know what an appellate court — and perhaps ultimately the Supreme Court — will say.
But we do know this: Each court that handles this matter should move as quickly as possible, just as other courts and Congress should move quickly to defeat other attempts to delay oversight. Mr. Trump deserves justice, but the American people deserve to know the results of that justice.
Neil Eggleston was a White House counsel from 2014 to 2017. Joshua A. Geltzer (@JGeltzer), the executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | How the Courts Should Handle Trump’s Oversight Defiance
Opinion | How the Courts Should Handle Trump’s Oversight Defiance
The Treasury Department, with its Monday announcement that it would not comply with a demand from House Democrats to release President Trump’s tax returns to Congress, has set up a battle that will now go to the courts to be settled.
President Trump has already filed a novel lawsuit to block his own accounting firm from complying with a congressional subpoena for financial records. Whatever the case or lack thereof to Mr. Trump’s suit, he deserves his day in court, just as any plaintiff would.
But the American people deserve that day to come quickly, given the obvious stakes for Mr. Trump’s re-election bid in 2020. For a court to be conscious of timing isn’t a political act — it’s simply responsible. We had firsthand experience at the White House dealing with the 2016 election’s most politically explosive litigation: the review and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails. A federal judge, conscious of the election implications, moved that litigation at breakneck speed. The same urgency should apply in Mr. Trump’s case.
It’s important to understand what Mr. Trump’s suit is about. After the Treasury Department ignored a deadline for providing the House House Ways and Means Committee with the president’s tax returns as a federal law appears to require, the committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm seeking his financial records. Mr. Trump acted quickly to prevent the firm from complying: He sued his own firm as well as the committee chair, arguing that the former is legally barred from cooperating with the latter. It’s now up to a federal judge to manage the case, which seems designed to delay any release of Mr. Trump’s records until after Election Day 2020.
Delay is itself a win for Mr. Trump and fits into his broader strategy of trying to avoid oversight and scrutiny — not only by filing this lawsuit but also by resisting other congressional subpoenas and, most recently, speaking out against congressional testimony by Robert Mueller that even Attorney General Bill Barr had publicly accepted.
Whatever the outcome of Mr. Trump’s legal argument, we urge the judge to move on the merits quickly. The issue appears to be straightforward. There are no privileges involved, and Mr. Trump’s major argument seems to be that Congress lacks the authority to investigate him. In our view, the case could be resolved by the district court within weeks, not months. The same rationale applies to the other subpoena litigation that is or will shortly be pending in the district courts, and it applies to Congress’s own efforts to obtain subpoenaed materials and secure witnesses for testimony. “Delay Till After 2020” should not be allowed to thwart legitimate oversight.
If Congress and ultimately the American people are to see Mr. Trump’s financial records, they should see them as soon as possible, as American voters are already considering whether they want to give the president four more years. Moving forward the litigation so that it’s resolved, one way or the other, soon or certainly well ahead of Election Day is a matter of judicial responsibility.
That’s exactly how a federal judge handled the litigation surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s emails in the 2016 campaign. When it emerged that she had used a private email address and server to conduct official business as secretary of state, it became clear that documents previously provided to the public in response to requests for State Department records hadn’t included the privately held emails. Consequently, some people who had made those previous requests went to court demanding that the privately held emails be released — quickly.
The federal judge overseeing the litigation agreed, rejecting the State Department’s proposed timeline for reviewing and releasing the emails and ordering the government to accelerate. He didn’t need to say out loud what everyone knew: Voters were assessing Mrs. Clinton’s fitness for office, and these emails could inform that assessment. It was obvious that the litigation should move swiftly and, in particular, should yield public releases of the emails before Election Day. It was a sense of the undeniable stakes of moving quickly when the litigation had such clear bearing on a coming presidential election.
For us, the judge’s sense of urgency was hardly good news. We were both serving at the White House then, one as White House counsel, the other as a national security lawyer. The judge’s insistence on a more aggressive timeline than the one our colleagues had proposed for reviewing and releasing Mrs. Clinton’s emails meant that lawyers across the government had to spend literally sleepless nights reviewing at a frantic pace thousands of pages of emails to determine which portions should be released (a vast majority) and which portions should be redacted to protect, for example, individuals’ privacy or executive privilege.
But the judge’s demand for speed was the right thing to do. There was no sense in having Mrs. Clinton’s emails come out after the American people had cast their votes for or against her. That was the voters’ choice to make, and they were entitled to do so based on the full insight into her tenure as secretary of state that the Freedom of Information Act allowed. The judge’s dogged pace simply — and responsibly — facilitated an informed choice.
We don’t know what the judge will say about Mr. Trump’s arguments for why his accounting firm shouldn’t respond to the congressional subpoena — bold arguments that would prevent one branch of government from scrutinizing another, as the recent intervention in the case by the House of Representatives underscores. And we don’t know what an appellate court — and perhaps ultimately the Supreme Court — will say.
But we do know this: Each court that handles this matter should move as quickly as possible, just as other courts and Congress should move quickly to defeat other attempts to delay oversight. Mr. Trump deserves justice, but the American people deserve to know the results of that justice.
Neil Eggleston was a White House counsel from 2014 to 2017. Joshua A. Geltzer (@JGeltzer), the executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, was the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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