Trump Family Sues
Deutsche Bank, Capital One To Prevent Them From Complying With Dem Subpoenas
By Emily Zanotti
@emzanotti
April 30, 2019
President Donald Trump, members of the Trump family, and
the Trump Corporation filed a second lawsuit over House Democrats' subpoenas
Monday, this time in an effort to stop Deutsche Bank and Capital One from
turning over Trump financial documents to congressional investigators.
Last week, Trump and the Trump Corporation filed
suit against House Democrats, demanding that a federal court halt
Democrats' flurry of subpoenas to White House officials and Trump Corporation
associates and quash a subpoena directed at an accounting firm that handles
Trump's personal financials. The Trump family also filed a follow-up suit
against the accounting firm in an effort to prevent them from complying with
any subpoenas that escaped the court's control.
Now, the Trump family is moving to stop a series of
subpoenas, from the same House Committee, designed to seek information on how
and why Deutsche Bank and Capital One continued extending the Trump Corporation
lines of credit in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when other financial
institutions had clearly blacklisted the company.
The New York Times reports
that plaintiffs — Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump,
and the family's privately held corporation — "argue that the Democratic
House committee leaders who issued the subpoenas engaged in a broad
overreach."
“This case involves congressional subpoenas that have no
legitimate or lawful purpose,” the complaint reads. “The subpoenas were issued
to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his
personal finances, his businesses and the private information of the president
and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to
cause him political damage. No grounds exist to establish any purpose other
than a political one.”
Democrats specifically want access to Trump's Deutsche
Bank accounts, because of a conspiracy theory that has persisted since Trump's
election: that Russian bigwigs used Deutsche Bank as a clearing house to fund
Trump's real estate investments, thus explaining why Deutsche Bank was able to
lend Trump money even when other banks were backing off.
The Trump family's argument in both suits are the same:
particularly in light of the Mueller report that cleared the Trump 2016
presidential campaign of any collusion with Russian officials, there's no real
reason to demand the Trumps' financial documents other than to embroil the
White House in an ongoing defensive campaign.
In previous filings the Trumps are more clear, calling
the Democrats' objective a “declared all-out political war," and subpoenas
simply a "weapon of choice" in battle.
It's not clear how the suit will shake out. Congress is
given broad leeway to pull documents and issue subpoenas, but allowing the
House Democrats access to decades of financial information that may only be
marginally relevant to, say, a possible violation of the Constitution's
Emoluments Clause, sets a strange precedent.
Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Elijah Cuimmings (D-MD) and others
have sent at least 80 subpoenas to Trump affiliates, former White House aides,
and "key witnesses" to what they believe is Trump malfeasance, and
the Democrats promise dozens of investigations over the course of the next two
years. At some point, the objective becomes far too broad.
Hearings on both suits are expected in the next few
weeks.
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