DC Lawyer Tries to Get More Info on Trump's Financial Disclosure Form, Again
The case marks Jeffrey Lovitky's second challenge alleging President Donald Trump's financial disclosure form was improper.
December 11, 2019 at 01:18 PM
4 minute read
As President Donald Trump and U.S. House committees battle in court over the president's private financial records, a fight over his financial disclosure form has been making its way through D.C. courts.
Attorney Jeffrey Lovitky first sued the president in 2017, alleging that Trump's financial disclosure form was improper because it didn't explicitly show which of Trump's liabilities and debt were personal and which were corporate.
Lovitky and government attorneys argued the case before a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Wednesday, after a district court judge granted a motion to dismiss earlier this year.
This is yet another challenge by Lovitky to the president's disclosure of his assets, after the D.C. Circuit ruled in a similar case last year that they could not order the president to amend a financial disclosure form that Trump filed as a candidate in 2016.
Lovitky argued to the panel that he was deprived of information as he decides who to vote for in the presidential election, as he can't determine whether Trump has any potential conflicts of interests from the information in the disclosure form.
But two of the judges, Patricia Millett and Judith Rogers, were skeptical about whether Lovitky was due any more information than he received under the statute.
"What in the statute allows you to police the accuracy" of the financial disclosure form, Millett asked, referring to the federal statute that allows members of the public to obtain such reports.
And both Millett and Rogers noted how Trump had actually revealed more information than required on the report, and questioned if that also violated federal law.
Lovitky said it did not, but that he wants to see the difference between Trump's corporate and personal liabilities.
But the judges also raised questions about how the federal government could address concerns about a president's financial disclosure form, particular from non-government employees who flag issues about it.
Millett asked Justice Department lawyer Matthew Glover what would happen if a president submitted "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds" of pages of liabilities for the form, in an effort to obscure some of the holdings.
Glover said that if concerns came up about the disclosure form, an ethics officer would likely sit down with the individual who submitted it and go over the report.
This lawsuit is one of several concerning Trump's financial holdings, after he declined to follow tradition and the advice of ethics experts, and place his assets into a blind trust while he's in office.
Another three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit on Monday heard arguments on whether a lawsuit from more than 200 Democratic members of Congress, alleging that Trump is in violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, can advance. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit will hear en banc arguments in a similar case Thursday.
The U.S. Supreme Court is also weighing three cases over efforts by investigators to enforce subpoenas for Trump's private financial records.
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