“This court previously allowed the committee’s demand for President Trump’s financial records to proceed without qualification,” Judge Mehta wrote. One category was financial data about the government’s leasing of the Old Post Office in Washington to Mr. Trump’s organization for a hotel in 2013. Noting that Mr. Trump chose not to divest from that lease when he became president, Judge Mehta ruled that Congress could see the information from both before Mr. Trump became president and while he was in office. But he rejected Congress’s right to broadly scrutinize Mr. Trump’s financial records for the years before he became a public official, citing the Supreme Court’s concerns and saying he was not persuaded that access to the documents was necessary for lawmakers’ stated rationale: weighing whether new candidate disclosure laws are needed. A lawyer for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment, including on whether his client would appeal the portion of the ruling that went against him.

Source: New York Times August 11, 2021 20:47 UTC