Federal judge delivers bodyblow to Donald Trump in Deutsche Bank battle over his tax returns

| 4:05 pm EDT May 22, 2019
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Donald Trump has been having a bad day to say the least. He got played like a fiddle by Nancy Pelosi this morning, to such an extent that by the time it was over, whatever he was planning to do on the White House lawn ended up dissolving into him rambling incoherently, like a madman on the run from the authorities. Just now, things got even worse for Trump, thanks to a federal judge.

Judge Ramos ruled just now that he’s denying Donald Trump’s request to block Deutsche Bank from turning over his financial records and tax returns to House Democrats, according to tweets from multiple reporters in the courtroom. Ramos ripped apart Trump’s legal argument that turning over the records would violate his privacy. This means that Trump has lost two such rulings thus far this week, both in rapid fashion, at the hands of two different judges.

This still doesn’t mean that Deutsche Bank and others can immediately turn over Trump’s records to the House. This fight, along with the parallel fight over Mazars and Trump’s accounting records, will continue to escalate through the court system. But this ruling helps cement that Trump is losing these rulings, and more importantly, he’s losing them quickly. This means that he’ll exhaust his appeals soon, and that’s when his nightmare scenario happens.

The various financial institutions involved have all made clear that they’re willing to fully cooperate with Congress, once the courts definitively rule that they’re allowed to do so. This is a way of working around the refusal of Donald Trump’s Treasury Department to turn over Trump’s tax returns.