The lawsuit, filed by the president’s private lawyers in federal court in Washington, opens a new front in Trump’s fight to keep his tax returns secret. His administration has already rejected subpoenas from the Ways and Means Committee for his federal tax information, prompting the House to file a lawsuit of its own in recent weeks seeking enforcement.
Now Trump is moving to close a side door opened by Democratic lawmakers in his home state by asking a judge to declare that the Ways and Means Committee “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” to request his state tax returns. The suit also seeks to nullify the New York law outright before Congress decides whether to use it.
“We have filed a lawsuit today in our ongoing efforts to end presidential harassment,” Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said in a statement. “The actions taken by the House and New York officials are nothing more than political retribution.”
Breaking from decades of tradition, Trump refused to release his tax returns during the 2016 presidential campaign, claiming that he was under audit but suggesting that someday he may make them public. He has never released them, and Democrats have been trying to pry them loose for years.
Attorney General Letitia James of New York, who is named in the latest suit, said her office had “all the confidence that this law is legal” and pledged to “vigorously defend” it in court. A spokesman for Rep. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, declined to comment.
The long-unfolding fights in Albany and Washington stem from Trump’s iron grip on his returns and Democratic suspicions that those documents might reveal financial malfeasance or tax fraud.
Democrats in Washington and Albany were not happy.
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., a member of the Ways and Means Committee, called the lawsuit “a pathetic stunt, not worth the forms it’s printed on, and should be laughed out of court.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.