President Trump and the House appear to have reached a narrow agreement that would speed up an appeal in a case where the President is trying to stop a Congressional subpoena for information from his longtime accountant from being enforced.
In a late Wednesday filing in the D.C. circuit, Trump and the House jointly ask the D.C. appeals court to speed up its hearing of the case, which came after Trump hired personal attorneys to prevent his accountant from carrying out the subpoena.
Under the deal, Trump would get a stay of the subpoena’s enforcement until the case is decided, while House Democrats would get accelerated consideration of the case.
The motion came after D.C. federal judge Amit Mehta denied a request from Trump to halt the subpoena’s enforcement on Monday, and after a federal judge in Manhattan denied a similar request on Wednesday regarding separate subpoenas to banks that had conducted business with Trump.
The two parties write in the filing that if the court grants the request to speed up the case, the House “agrees to suspend the time for production set by the subpoena during the pendency of this appeal.”
“Mazars agrees to continue collecting and preparing responsive documents but not to produce any documents in response to the subpoena during that period,” the document reads.
House Democrats have accused Trump of filing the lawsuits as part of a strategy to delay their fulfillment beyond the 2020 election. House general counsel Douglas Letter raised that concern at the hearing in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, saying that Congress “desperately do[es] not want that to happen.”
Under a proposed briefing schedule included in the filing, the case would be fully briefed by July 12. After that, the parties ask that the “Court hold oral argument as soon as the Court deems practicable.”
The subpoena at issue in the D.C. appeals court was sent by House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in April to Mazars USA LLP as part of an investigation into whether the President would routinely cook the books of the Trump Organization, and into whether Trump is complying with various ethics requirements.
Read the filing below:
