Two banks have already turned over Donald Trump’s financial records to Maxine Waters without his knowledge

| 7:32 pm EDT May 22, 2019
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Even as Donald Trump has been fighting (and incrementally losing) in court to try to stop financial institutions like Deutsche Bank and Mazars from turning over his financial records to House Democrats, it turns out Trump didn’t cover all his bases. Two other major banks have already turned over Trump’s financial records without his knowledge.

The House Financial Services Committee, led by Chair Maxine Waters, has already obtained the Trump Organization’s financial records from Wells Fargo and TD Bank, according to a report this evening from NBC News. Donald Trump surely would have taken emergency legal action to try to stop or delay this if he’d known it was happening, so the entire process had to have happened without his knowledge. When Waters coincidentally appeared on the Chris Matthews show on MSNBC after the news broke, she declined to comment on it, in an apparent sign that secrecy is her best weapon.

So what did these banks give to the committee? Wells Fargo turned over a “few thousand documents” while TD Bank turned of just a “handful,” but NBC says that they’ve both fully complied with the subpoenas, so this suggests that they’ve each turned over everything they had. Last month the New York Times reported that Deutsche Bank had several years of Trump’s tax returns and was willing to give them to the House once the court battle is settled. It’s not yet clear if Wells Fargo also has Trump’s tax returns and turned them over.

In any case, this revelation is a reminder that House Democrats have been doing a lot more behind the scenes to set up Donald Trump’s downfall than what’s been seen in public view. The Resistance wants to know what’s going on with these moves, of course. But the reality is that if Maxine Waters had announced these subpoenas publicly in advance, Trump would have moved in court to try to block it, and Waters wouldn’t have obtained these records nearly as quickly.