House Ways and Means Committee has Trump’s tax returns

Comes after a yearslong battle

The House Ways & Means Committee has obtained six years of former president Donald Trump’s tax returns after a yearslong effort to obtain them, CNN reported.

The Treasury Department confirmed to CNN that it complied with a court order to hand over the returns to the committee, mostly from his time serving as president.

The delivery came after comes after the Supreme Court declined to intervene to prevent the handing over of the tax returns, despite the fact that the former president nominated three of the six conservative justices on the nine-member bench.

Mr Trump refused to release his tax returns when he ran for president in 2016, saying that he was being audited by the Internal Revenue Services at the time.

The handover would allow for the Democratic majority on the Ways & Means Committee to release reports on Mr Trump’s taxes before Republicans take control of the House at the beginning of next year.

Mr Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen told the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee that Mr Trump engaged in a scheme wherein he allegedly inflated and deflated the value of his assets for tax and loan purposes, which is a crime.

The move also comes as Mr Trump faces an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James into his business practices. Furthermore, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith to handle the multiple probes that the US Department of Justice is conducting.

-John Bowden contrinuted to this report.