New York Attorney General Letitia James today released the following statement after President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against her over New York’s TRUST Act was dismissed outright by District Judge Carl J. Nichols in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia:
“We have said all along that this lawsuit should be dismissed and we are pleased with the court’s conclusion. The TRUST Act is an important tool that will ensure accountability to millions of Americans who deserve to know the truth. We have never doubted that this law was legal, which is why we vigorously defended it from the start and will continue to do so.”
In denying the president’s request for jurisdictional discovery, the court commented, “[a] plaintiff may not use jurisdictional discovery to ‘conduct a fishing expedition in the hopes of discovering some basis of jurisdiction.’”
New York’s TRUST Act was signed into law in July 2019 to allow state officials to access the New York State tax returns of certain federal, state, and local government officials — including the president — if those tax returns are requested by congressional tax committees when the “returns have been requested for a specified and legitimate legislative purpose.” After the Act was signed into law, President Trump sued Attorney General James, the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, and the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Michael Schmidt, to halt the implementation of the law.
