Tag: house financial services committee
Trump Lawyers Use Faked Quotes To Block Bank Subpoenas

Trump Lawyers Use Faked Quotes To Block Bank Subpoenas

Trump took another shameful step Monday night in his quest to obstruct legitimate congressional oversight, suing both Deutsche Bank and Capital One to try to prevent the two banks from complying with subpoenas for Trump’s financial records.

The lawsuit to block subpoenas issued by the House Financial Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee — filed on behalf of Trump; his adult children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump; and several of his businesses — is whiny and riddled with fake quotes that Trump’s lawyers attribute to House Democrats.

Trump’s legal team claims 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.”

Trump’s lawyers also argue that Congress went too far in subpoenaing records from Trump’s adult children, saying it is “intrusive and overbroad.”

However, Ivanka Trump works in the White House and both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are campaign surrogates — making their finances completely relevant for investigations into conflicts of interest. All three of them have also been involved in running the Trump family businesses, which Trump’s sons continue to do today.

Politico’s Kyle Cheney uncovered multiple instances in which Trump’s lawyers use fake quotes from House Democrats to make their case against the subpoenas — which is not only embarrassing for any ethical lawyer, but is a sign that the legal argument is so weak that his legal team had to doctor quotes to try to make their point.

In one instance, the legal team attributes a headline written by Vanity Fair to Democrats, as well as takes another quote from now House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer out of context.

Experts say the suit has little legal merit.

“This isn’t a close legal question,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School, told the Washington Post. “I’m quite confident there has never been a situation where a congressional subpoena has been quashed without a finding that it violates a constitutional right.”

However, even if courts rule against Trump, filing the suit is part of a concerted effort to stall and delay oversight that could uncover unethical or even illegal dealings Trump and his family have engaged in over the years.

Trump has already filed a lawsuit against the House Oversight Committee to block his accounting firm from handing over records that could show that Trump defrauded lenders by inflating his net worth. And he’s ordered current and former White House aides to defy other congressional subpoenas that are part of a litany of investigations into Trump’s tax returns, his attempts to obstruct justice that were outlined in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and the White House security clearance process.

Trump’s obstruction is so bad that Democrats are weighing throwing those who refuse to comply with subpoenas in jail for contempt.

In the end, this latest Trump lawsuit is yet another attack on Congress’ legitimate oversight power. That Trump feels he needs to block that oversight shows he is clearly scared about what Democrats might uncover.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: (L-R) Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump attend the ground breaking of the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office Building in Washington July 23, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

House Committees Subpoena Banks In Probe Of Trump Finances

House Committees Subpoena Banks In Probe Of Trump Finances

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

The only major bank that President Donald Trump has been able to count on for financial backing was among those that were issued subpoenas Monday by House Democrats.

The House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees both demanded that Deutsche Bank—one of Trump’s most reliable creditors—as well as Citigroup and Bank of America turn over records pertaining to the president’s personal and corporate finances.

Last year, reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating Trump’s financial dealings with Deutsche Bank led to the president to call for Mueller’s probe to be shut down. But Deutsche itself opened an investigation into Trump shortly after he entered office to determine whether its loans to the president had any links to Moscow.

Over the past two decades, Deutsche Bank has been the only financial institution to continue giving credit to Trump. It loaned more than $2 billion to Trump over those years, $300 million of which Trump still owed to the bank when he took office.

As Common Dreams reported last year, German police raided Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt headquarters in November in connection with the Panama Papers money laundering investigation. The subpoenas issued by the House committees reportedly pertain to possible money-laundering in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“The information that could bring down Trump,” wrote John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus, at Common Dreams last year, “may be somewhere in the Deutsche Bank files. The relevant documents would link the bank’s two most questionable financial activities—lending to Trump and washing Russian money.”

Democrats vowed to pursue Trump’s financial records after they won control of the House in November, saying they wanted to determine whether Russia may have had leverage over the president via his loans from Deutsche Bank.

“The potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement Monday.

The subpoenas represent the latest step in Democrats’ effort to get to the bottom of Trump’s financial ties and those of the Trump Organization—from which the president refused to divest when he took office in 2017.

The House Ways and Means Committee also requested Trump’s personal and business tax returns from his accounting firm, leading the president to tell the company not to comply. The accounting firm, Mazars USA has said it plans “fully comply with its legal obligations” while Deutsche Bank says it is cooperating with the House Committees’ requests.

IMAGE: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Bernanke Will Stimulate if Necessary

In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that the central bank would commit to another round of stimulus if economic growth continues to stall.

The Fed Chief acknowledged that economic numbers from the first half of 2011 were less than impressive. Attributing the dismal 9.2% unemployment rate from the June jobs report to a
“slowdown in aggregate demand… centered in the household sector,” Bernanke concluded that the “willingness of consumers to spend will be an important determinant of the pace of recovery in the oncoming quarters.” Essentially, the pace of the recovery hinges on consumer confidence.

Bernanke made clear that the Fed — as they did in 2008 — has the capacity to pump money into the economy even after the interest rate hits zero. “Even with the federal funds rate close to zero,” he said. “We have a number of ways in which we could act to ease financial conditions further.”

But while Bernanke’s 2012 and 2013 growth and unemployment numbers remained relatively optimistic for a faster recovery, he acknowledged that the slowdown of the first half of this year might have lingering effects.

This all means that if slow growth continues, the Chairman may not hesitate in “deploying additional stimulus if conditions warrant.”

Of course, progressives have been urging Bernanke to use the tools at his disposal for years now in order to boost the employment rate and pace of economic growth (the recent policy known as QE2 was seen as something of a success, but worried investors who are terrified of the prospect of inflation).

If he took a hard stance on boosting employment instead of combating barely-existent inflation, both the Democrats’ electoral prospects–and the job prospects of millions of Americans–would increase markedly. But how badly does Bernanke, a moderate Republican, want this?