President Trump has agreed to stop his lawsuit and his accounting firm will turn over some of his financial records to the House Oversight committee.
Here’s more via the NY Post:
A House committee seeking financial records from former President Donald Trump has reached an agreement that ends litigation on the matter and requires an accounting firm to turn over some of the material, the panel’s leader announced Thursday.
The long-running case began in April 2019, when the House Committee on Oversight and Reform first subpoenaed a wealth of records from Trump’s then-accounting firm, Mazars USA. The committee cited testimony from Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, that it said raised questions about the president’s representation of his financial affairs when it came to seeking loans and paying taxes.
Under the agreement, Trump has agreed to end his legal challenges to the subpoena and Mazars USA has agreed to produce responsive documents to the committee as expeditiously as possible, said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who heads the panel.
“After numerous court victories, I am pleased that my committee has now reached an agreement to obtain key financial documents that former President Trump fought for years to hide from Congress,” Maloney said.
Trump is facing investigations on several fronts, including the storage of top-secret government information discovered at his Mar-a-Lago home and whether the former president’s team criminally obstructed the inquiry. In Georgia, prosecutors are investigating whether he and allies illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, congressional committees are following through on investigations that began when he was president.
You may be wondering why Trump would agree to this? Well the settlement comes AFTER a judge said the committee could only aks for certain records:
The settlement over Mazars follows a July decision by a federal appeals court in Washington that narrowed what records Congress is entitled to obtain. The court said the committee should be given records pertinent to financial ties between foreign countries and Trump or any of his businesses for 2017-18.
The appeals court also ordered Mazars to turn over documents between November 2016 and 2018 relating to the Trump company that held the lease granted by the federal government for the former Trump International Hotel, located between the White House and the Capitol.
In the decision, the court said Trump’s financial records would “advance the Committee’s consideration of ethics reform legislation across all three of its investigative tracks,” including on presidential ethics and conflicts of interest, presidential financial disclosures, and presidential adherence to constitutional safeguards against foreign interference and undue influence.
I’m sure Democrats are happy to get anything on Trump and will try to make as much scandal as they can out of what they’ll get. But I doubt Trump would have agreed to settle if he felt the narrowing was still overbroad.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming months and years, as we get closer to 2024.