On Thursday, House Democrats on the Oversight Committee announced that they have reached an agreement for Donald Trump’s former accounting firm to turn over “critical” financial documents that lawmakers say can help elucidate questions in their investigation into Trump’s finances and self-dealing.
Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) announced in a statement that lawmakers had struck the deal with Mazars USA and Trump himself after a years-long legal battle over the records that Trump had attempted to hide. The committee had originally issued a subpoena for the documents in 2019.
The records will be “key” to the lawmakers’ “investigation into President Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and foreign financial ties,” Maloney said. “These documents will inform the Committee’s efforts to get to the bottom of former President Trump’s egregious conduct and ensure that future presidents do not abuse their position of power for personal gain.”
One of the big questions around Trump’s business finances is whether or not he and the Trump Organization have committed fraud. The Oversight Committee is also investigating potential conflicts of interest Trump may have had while in office as well as possible cases of self-dealing.
In February, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified that Trump regularly lies about his finances – deflating the value of his assets to dodge taxes while inflating their value when it “served his purposes.” The ex-president would do the latter for a number of reasons, Cohen said, including to obtain a large bank loan, adding value to his brand or pure vanity.
Cohen shared portions of Trump’s financial documents with the committee, “which raised questions about President Trump’s representations on these forms and other financial disclosure documents, particularly relating to the President’s debts,” the committee wrote on Thursday. Cohen also testified that Trump and his business trust had reimbursed illegal payments during his 2016 presidential run.
Before Cohen’s testimony, Mazars had broken up with the Trump Organization, saying that the company’s financial records from 2011 and 2020 “should no longer be relied upon,” as Mazars general counsel William Kelly said. This is a particularly damning statement, experts say, and likely portends legal trouble for the former president and his businesses.
Mazars came to light as a result of a wide-spanning investigation into Trump’s businesses by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who earlier this year alleged that Trump’s family business has continually engaged in “fraudulent or misleading” financial practices in order to boost its bottom line.
Trump has filed several lawsuits in trying to conceal the financial records, including one to block the release of the Mazars documents to the House lawmakers and one to block James’s investigation, which was dismissed by a federal judge in May.
The committee has already found some questionable financial practices among the documents they previously obtained from Mazars; in October, lawmakers found that Trump had provided misleading financial information in his lease application for a Trump International Hotel.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy