Former President Donald Trump on Monday submitted an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to block a judge’s order regarding his tax returns.
The request came days after Trump lost an attempt to reverse a judge’s order that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) give years of his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.
“This case raises important questions about the separation of powers that will affect every future President,” Trump’s lawyers said in their emergency application to Chief Justice John Roberts.
Trump’s legal team asked the court to act by Wednesday to delay an appeals court ruling that cleared the way for the IRS to deliver the tax returns on Thursday.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Trump’s similar request, leaving it in denial pending his expected petition to the Supreme Court.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal reiterated the court’s decision in a statement, saying that “the law has always been on our side.”
“Former President Trump has tried to delay the inevitable, but once again, the Court has affirmed the strength of our position,” Neal said. “We’ve waited long enough — we must begin our oversight of the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program as soon as possible.”
If Trump succeeds, it would give him the opportunity to formally ask the high court to hear an appeal of the ruling, but the lawyers also said the Supreme Court could consider Monday’s filing itself a request to hear the case.
The former president’s appeal to the ruling is one of many legal battles Trump has found himself in. His legal team has also filed a motion seeking an independent review of the records seized by the FBI in the raid of his private home in Mar-a-Lago last August.
“They demanded that the security cameras be turned off, a request we rightfully denied. They prevented my attorneys from observing what was being taken in the raid, saying ‘absolutely not,'” he said in a separate Truth Social post.
“They took documents covered by attorney-client and executive privilege, which is not allowed. They took my passports. They even brought a ‘safe cracker’ and successfully broke into my personal safe, which revealed… nothing!” The post continued.
