The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump’s tax-records battle was still moving on June 18, 2021, but not because the Supreme Court had handed down a new ruling that day. The live dispute was the House Ways and Means Committee’s effort to get Trump’s tax information from the Treasury Department and IRS, a request the panel had renewed two days earlier. That left the fight exactly where it had been for weeks: over whether Congress could pry loose confidential tax records under a federal disclosure statute. ([waysandmeans.house.gov](https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2021/06/16/letter-rep-kelly-demands-answers-on-breach-of-taxpayers-personal-finances/?utm_source=openai))

The committee’s June 16 letter, sent by Ways and Means Republicans, centered on a separate privacy-breach issue involving taxpayer data that had been reported by ProPublica. That made the June 2021 record fight different from the earlier 2019 request Richard Neal made for Trump’s personal and business returns, which had been framed as oversight of the IRS’s presidential-audit program. The House dispute was therefore not a new twist in the Supreme Court litigation over Trump records; it was a distinct congressional request aimed at IRS-held information. ([waysandmeans.house.gov](https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2021/06/16/letter-rep-kelly-demands-answers-on-breach-of-taxpayers-personal-finances/?utm_source=openai))

Trump continued to resist disclosure, but June 18 did not bring a new high-court loss in the Ways and Means matter. The separate Supreme Court case that had already gone against him involved a grand jury subpoena in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation, not the House committee’s demand for tax returns. On that date, the practical question was still unresolved: whether the IRS and Treasury would turn over the material Congress wanted, or keep it sealed. ([supremecourt.gov](https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/ordersofthecourt/21?utm_source=openai))