Trump's tax returns case lost in the Supreme Court. Now what?

UPDATE (Dec. 30, 2022, 9:57 a.m.

UPDATE (Dec. 30, 2022, 9:57 a.m. EST): On Friday, the House Ways and Means Committee released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax to the public, ending a drawn-out legal battle.

This week, in an unsigned order with no dissents, the U.S. Supreme Court finally allowed the U.S. Treasury to deliver six years’ worth of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. Declining to give a hearing to the former president’s arguments, the high court let stand a lower court’s ruling that the committee has the right to see the tax returns of the president and eight of his companies.

The request lingered in a federal court in Washington until Trump was replaced by President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice reversed its legal position, and Ways and Means Committee chair, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., sent a second request to the Treasury Department in 2021.

This is clearly a legal victory for lawmakers, but one might be forgiven for wondering what the point of this massive effort is.

This is clearly a legal victory for lawmakers, but one might be forgiven for wondering what the point of this massive effort is, since the Manhattan district attorney has already obtained many tax returns and related documents for Trump and his organizations. These documents were procured from Mazar’s — the accounting firm that prepared Trump’s tax returns but later disavowed their accuracy — and have already been used to extract a guilty plea from Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg and bring the company to trial. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, also has years of tax returns, and has brought a civil case based largely on them. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York undoubtedly have them as well. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-tax-returns-case-lost-supreme-court-now-rcna58579

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