House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) has asked for six years of President Trump's personal and business tax returns by April 23, using a law that doesn't give Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin much wiggle room. On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if Trump will "tell the IRS not to release them?" "We'll have to see what happened on that front," Sanders said.
Sanders repeated the argument from Trump's lawyers and Mnuchin that Neal's stated policy purpose for seeking Trump's tax returns is insufficient or purely partisan, claiming "the only reason that the oversight committee has the ability to request someone's taxes are for the purpose of determining policy." (Whether Neal needs a policy purpose is a question that hasn't been answered by the courts, though the 1924 tax law in question was enacted in response to the Harding administration's Teapot Dome scandal and most legal experts agree Neal's purpose would pass the legal threshold in any case.)
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Wallace also asked Sanders how the White House is preparing for information in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report that "clearly is going to be damaging to the president" — "I don't think it is going to be damaging to the president," she said — and Sanders claimed Trump's repeated praise of WikiLeaks was clearly Trump "making a joke during the 2016 campaign," to which a skeptical Wallace replied: "It was a joke he made over and over again." Watch the entire interview below. Peter Weber
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