WASHINGTON – Mazars USA, the longtime accounting firm of former President Donald J. Trump, which severed ties with him and his family business this year, has begun turning over documents related to it. his financial dealings with Congress.
After a years-long legal battle, the House Oversight Committee received its first batch of documents from the company, which recently entered into a legal settlement agreeing to provide a range of documents. financial data from several years before Mr. Trump took office and during the early part of his presidency. . Mazars said in February it can no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial reporting it prepared for the Trump Organization.
More documents are expected to follow.
“They sent us some documents,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat of New York and chair of the committee, said in an interview Saturday. “We’re looking at them.”
Ms. Maloney declined to say exactly what documents the panel has received so far, but she said that “the Mazars are being very cooperative.”
“We were the only committee that got the financial documents,” she added.
The documents Mazars is providing to Congress relate to Mr. Trump’s financial dealings from 2014 to 2018. He took office in 2017 following a career in real estate and other businesses. .
The Oversight Committee has struggled to obtain financial documents from Mr. Trump as part of an investigation into allegations of conflicts of interest, inadequate financial disclosures and breach of provisions. financial resources of the Constitution, preventing the president from receiving profits from a domestic or foreign government other than his official compensation.
In 2019, Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, testify before the committee that Mr Trump’s financial statements misrepresent the former president’s assets and liabilities and that Mr Trump “inflated his net worth when it served his purposes”. and sometimes, “inflate his assets to reduce his estate taxes”.
The commission then issued a subpoena against Mazars, prompting Mr. Trump to file a lawsuit against the company to prevent it from complying. The commission then won a series of legal victories, including before the Supreme Court in July 2020.
This month, the committee reached a settlement with Mr. Trump and Mazars that allowed the panel to obtain key financial documents.
The agreement declare that the Mazars must submit any documents between 2014 and 2018 showing any false or undisclosed information about Mr. Trump’s assets, income or liabilities; communication regarding any potential concern that financial information provided by Mr. Trump’s companies is inaccurate; documents from November 2016 to 2018 relating to the Old Post Office Building, a federal property in Washington that Mr. Trump’s company converted into a hotel through a lease; and documents from 2017 and 2018 relating to relationships between Mr. Trump’s businesses and foreign countries.
The settlement allows Mazars to exercise its “independent judgment” in determining which documents respond to the commission’s subpoena.
“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 power for personal gain,” Maloney said. know in a statement announcing the settlement.
The Oversight Committee is also engaged in an investigation into Trump’s handling of presidential records and classified documents.
“Some of the information is top secret, we don’t even know where it is,” Ms. Maloney said. “At the moment, we don’t know how many are still there.”
The federal government failed for over a year and a half to retrieve sensitive and classified documents from Mr. Trump before leaving his job on August 8 to search his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
Ms. Maloney has requested an official review from the archives into which presidential records, if any, have been removed from the White House by Mr Trump that have yet to be counted and whether the archives believe they may be possible. remains in his possession or not.
She asked authorities to search other Trump properties to ensure the return of all sensitive documents.
“We have been very active in continuing after receiving these documents and will continue until we are sure that we have obtained all of them,” she said.
