WASHINGTON — House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has reissued a subpoena to former President Donald Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA for financial records related to the panel’s investigations into presidential conflicts of interest.
“For more than 22 months, the committee has been denied key information needed to inform legislative action to address the once-in-a-generation ethics crisis created by former President Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest,” Maloney said in a memo from Feb. 23 obtained by NBC News.
“The committee’s need for this information — in order to verify key facts and tailor legislative reforms to be as effective and efficient as possible — remains just as compelling now as it was when the committee first issued its subpoena, and the committee’s legislative efforts remain just as critical to the American people as they were before President Trump vacated the White House on January 20, 2021.”
The committee, under the leadership of the late-Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., first issued the subpoena to Mazars in April 2019, but that expired with the new Congress.
Maloney said that the new subpoena will again be “for financial records related to the committee’s investigations into presidential conflicts of interest, presidential contracts with the federal government and self-dealing, and presidential emoluments.”
As House Democrats continue their investigations into the former president’s financial records, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance now has Trump’s tax returns and underlying documents. Vance is seeking tax returns covering eight years for a grand jury investigation of hush money payments and other financial transactions.
That subpoena for the tax documents from Mazars was enforced last week after the Supreme Court declined to stop their production following an emergency application from Trump’s attorneys — a decisive defeat in his long legal battle to keep his tax records out of investigators' hands.
The ruling doesn't mean the returns will become public any time soon, and they might never be publicly released. Under New York state law, materials turned over to a grand jury must be kept secret.
Trump issued a long statement decrying the order as the continuation of a politically motivated witch hunt, and he vowed to "fight on."
"The Supreme Court never should have let this 'fishing expedition' happen, but they did," the statement said. "This is something which has never happened to a President before, it is all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat location, New York City and State, completely controlled and dominated by a heavily reported enemy of mine, Governor Andrew Cuomo."
