Congressional Democrats are poised to dig deeper into President Trump’s finances following the Thursday release of the Mueller report.
While much of the political focus around Trump’s finances has centered around his tax returns, other investigations into his business dealings and income may progress more quickly, and even possibly yield Trump’s tax information before Democrats’ attempt to demand his tax returns can be hashed out.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm late last month. On Monday the House Financial Services Committee and House Intelligence Committee jointly subpoenaed Trump’s regular lender, Germany-based Deutsche Bank, among other demands for information on potential Russian money laundering.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report details contacts between members of Trump’s circle, including Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and executives of Russian banks sanctioned by the Obama administration as part of an effort to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin after he directed the invasion of parts of Ukraine.
“What my committee needs now, needs to do is think about this from a counterintelligence standpoint,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a member of both committees that issued the banking subpoenas, said in a Thursday interview with CNN. “Are there elements of the many interactions that Donald Trump and his people and his family and his campaign had with Russians that could provide the Russians something to hold over them, starting with the president?”
“That gets to business dealings, it gets to possible financing mechanisms … in as much as anything else needs to be checked, it relates to the counterintelligence questions” around Trump, Himes said.
The subpoenas of those records could move more quickly than the much-anticipated request for Trump’s personal and business tax information from the House Ways and Means Committee, which the president has set the stage to challenge in court. Experts in congressional tax investigations say that tax information obtained through banks or accounting firms would not be subject to the the same confidentiality protections that would bind Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., if he were to obtain Trump’s tax returns.
“It is very unlikely that President Trump’s attorneys will be able to block Congressional subpoenas of various banks, since the Supreme Court has explicitly upheld bank subpoenas as valid, Congress has been issuing bank subpoenas for decades, and following the money is often critical to its oversight function,” said Elise Bean, a longtime Democratic congressional staffer with experience in tax and finance-related investigations, now a law professor at Wayne State University.
Former House Oversight Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., now with the public policy practice of the law firm Holland and Knight, agreed that congressional Democrats could gain a window into Trump’s finances more quickly through subpoenas of his financial records through third parties than through the Ways and Means request to the Treasury Department for his tax returns.
“That is I think a much easier route to go,” said Davis of the Oversight Committee’s subpoena of Trump’s accounting firm. “It makes it a lot more difficult to fight it in court.”
Ostensibly, the committees are investigating different angles into Trump’s finances: Oversight and Reform is investigating whether his businesses present a conflict of interest, Ways and Means is investigating whether the IRS is auditing Trump and his businesses and whether the president may have underpaid taxes, and the Financial Services and Intelligence Committees are investigating whether there are ties between Trump and his family to Russian criminals.
Davis said that the Oversight Committee, which subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm, is the natural committee to continue digging into Trump’s finances.
“Elijah Cummings is a bulldog, he’s seasoned in this stuff. They’re equipped to do this whereas the other committees are more legislative,” said Davis. “The dots are out there but they aren’t connected.”
Both Davis and Dean Zerbe, a former Republican congressional staffer specializing in investigations, thought Democrats risked tripping over themselves, either in pursuit of new information or in the court of public opinion, through the three parallel financial investigations.
“There’s a longtime tradition that when the president’s party is in Congress they underinvestigate, and when they don’t control Congress they overinvestigate,” said Davis, adding that he couldn’t comment on the bank subpoenas due to his firm representing an unnamed client involved in the probe.
But Bean wasn’t so sure.
“Congressional oversight is never neat and tidy,” she said. “Many committees have overlapping jurisdictions, which is a good thing to ensure that more than one committee can take a look at a problem and different aspects of that problem are explored.”
Congressional Democrats are also aware that their investigations could be seen as overreach, that they need to do more than simply investigate Trump, and that Republican control of the Senate makes impeachment unlikely even if major new revelations are uncovered.
“Even if you impeach in the House, the probability that the Senate will convict today is I think, sadly today, exactly zero,” said Himes on Thursday. “You’ve gone through a year, a year and a half of work where we haven’t been working on infrastructure and retirement and student loans and all the things that we should be working on, only for the Senate to do what is perfectly predictable and not convict the president.”
