The left has been trying to do anything to derail the Trump agenda and we have never seen such presidential harassment.
Trump just disbanded his foundation after a fight with New York state among other cases he has around the country.
Trump did beat back Stormy Daniels and got a whopping $300k in the process and now another pesky liberal organization just suffered a huge defeat against him in court.
From CNN: DC Circuit Court Judge Karen Henderson wrote that the President should be afforded the same privacy rights as any other citizen.
“This case presents the question whether a member of the public — here, a nonprofit organization — can use a FOIA request to obtain an unrelated individual’s tax records without his consent,” Henderson wrote in a opinion on behalf of herself and two other appellate judges. “With certain limited exceptions — all inapplicable here — the answer is no.”
Previous presidents have released their tax returns as a matter of course, but Trump has resisted making his records public, both as a candidate and in office.
Henderson wrote that the President’s tax returns are protected by the IRS.
“No one can demand to inspect another’s tax records,” she wrote. “And the (Internal Revenue Code’s) confidentiality protections extend to the ordinary taxpayer and the President alike.”
The decision in the DC federal appeals court affirmed the prior decision of a trial-level judge rejecting the freedom of information suit filed against the IRS by the nonprofit Election Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in 2017.
From Law & Crime: Judge Henderson said that the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) and FOIA appear to be in tension (one protects confidentiality, the other promotes transparency), but said that they actually aren’t.
“One statute demands openness; the other privacy. But as we explain […] the statutes work well together. Not all records are subject to FOIA requests,” Henderson said. “An agency need not disclose records ‘specifically exempted from disclosure by statute.’ Because the IRC is such a statute, records that fall within its confidentiality mandate are exempt from FOIA.”
Henderson said that the issue at hand was pretty straightforward.
“This case presents the question whether a member of the public—here, a nonprofit organization—can use a FOIA request to obtain an unrelated individual’s tax records without his consent. With certain limited exceptions—all inapplicable here—the answer is no,” the judge opined. “No one can demand to inspect another’s tax records.”
