The Trump Family Is Trying to Sue Its Way Out of Congressional Oversight
Save for hearing his name uttered aloud by a cable news host, there is nothing that perpetually aggrieved president Donald Trump loves more in this world than filing a lawsuit. It is for this reason that on Monday, he sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One—which received subpoenas from House Democratic leadership last week for the Trump family's financial records since 2010—in a preemptive effort to prevent the banking giants from furnishing the requested information to Congress.
The suit's plaintiffs include the three eldest Trump children, a bevy of Trump family businesses, and the president himself, but "solely in his capacity as a private citizen." (The complaint also identifies Ivanka as "the daughter of President Trump," conveniently eliding the fact that she is also a government employee and senior White House advisor.) Its principal theory is that the congressional subpoenas are invalid because they do not relate to a proper "legislative purpose," and thus have no purpose "other than a political one"—that is, that they are are intended solely to "inflict maximum political damage."
Members of Congress, of course, are perfectly aware of the need to establish a link between a given subpoena and their task of legislating. As the complaint concedes, House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff and House Financial Services Committee chair Maxine Waters specified that they intend their subpoenas to investigate "potential foreign influence on the U.S. political process" and the use of the financial system for "illicit purposes."
If, hypothetically speaking, the records in question would yield information about the Trump family's business interests in Russia during the 2016 campaign, or the president's well-established practice of committing tax fraud, that information would be relevant to matters within the committees's respective jurisdictions. A 1927 Supreme Court opinion sensibly declared that as long as Congress is dealing with a subject area in which it has the power to legislate, it has broad authority to conduct investigations to elicit information that would be helpful to that effort.
Yet the complaint argues that the legislative branch's oversight of the executive branch's conduct—a foundational aspect of our system of checks and balances—amounts to an unconstitutional assumption of law enforcement or judicial powers.
A week ago, employing similarly tortured logic, Trump sued House Oversight Committee chair Elijah Cummings over a subpoena of the president's accounting firm, alleging the existence of a secret "all-out political war" against President Trump. (In a perfectly Trumpian touch, the suit also asks the court to require Cummings to pay Trump's legal fees, as if a 12-term United States congressman were a Queens sheet metal vendor with whom Trump had a billings dispute in 1983.) For the next year and a half, the White House apparently plans to deal with any efforts to investigate the president's potential misconduct by burying House leadership in court filings and paperwork.
Trump's legal theories are novel, but his strategy here is not. The family has a long and proud history of litigiousness that careens between greedily petty and frivolously absurd (suing a small Internet marketing firm called "Trump Your Competition" on the grounds that they were profiting off his name and likeness.) In 2017, USA Today surveyed the dockets of five other well-known real-estate developers and found that Trump and his business interests had been involved in more lawsuits than all of them combined.
In fact, this is not the first time the president has sued Deutsche Bank, or even the silliest grounds on which he dragged them into court. In 2008, when the bank sued him over a $40 million debt, Trump counter-sued, ambitiously claiming that the contemporaneous economic crisis was an act of God—this is a real thing he argued, not a joke—which eliminated his contractual obligation to repay the loan. Because Deutsche Bank had played a role in facilitating the global financial meltdown, he added, it should pay him $3 million for his troubles.
DMT.NEWS
via DMT.NEWS, Jay Willis
April 30, 2019 at 03:50PM
