President Donald Trump and Elijah Cummings (Credit: Getty Images)
Facing a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, the Trump Organization is fighting back.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday against Democratic committee chairman Elijah Cummings and the accounting firm Mazars USA LLP, the Trump Organization is seeking a court order to block the subpoena of eight years’ worth of the company’s financial statements, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The subpoena “threatens to expose Plaintiffs’ confidential information and lacks ‘a legitimate legislative purpose,’” lawyers for the organization say in the lawsuit.
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Mazars last week for financial statements from 2011 through 2018 pertaining to President Trump, the Trump Organization and other related entities, as well as memos, notes and communications that contributed to the preparation of those documents.
“The committee has full authority to investigate whether the president may have engaged in illegal conduct before and during his tenure in office,” Cummings said in an April 12 letter advising the committee of the subpoena.
The letter cited the February testimony of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who said that Trump had inflated his property values to obtain a loan from Deutsche Bank. Several of the financial statements Cohen turned over to the committee were prepared by Mazars.
Trump’s lawyers criticized Cohen testimony’s in the new lawsuit, calling it a “partisan stunt, not a good-faith effort to obtain accurate testimony from a reliable witness.”
The testimony has already triggered a few other subpoenas, including one from the New York State Department of Financial Services against insurance broker Aon, and one from New York Attorney General Letitia James against Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank.
The subpoena from the House Oversight Committee asks that Mazars turn over the requested documents by April 29. [WSJ] — Kevin Sun