Last night, U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) harshly criticized a letter from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin signaling that the Trump administration would stonewall House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal’s (D-MA-01) request for Donald Trump’s tax returns, pursuant to his clear power under 26 U.S. Code § 6103(f).

“This is calculated stonewalling even at the cost of breaking the law,” said Rep. Pascrell, who has led the effort in Congress to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns. “What’s unprecedented is a president hiding his tax returns and using the IRS as a personal shield. We’re not backing down.”

Rep. Pascrell has been Congress’s most vocal proponent of releasing President Trump’s tax returns in order to reveal any potential conflicts of interest. Since February 2017, Pascrell has led the call for the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means to invoke Section 6103 of the tax code to obtain Trump’s tax returns. Pascrell believes that exposing the tax returns to sunlight is critical to revealing any potential conflicts of interest, including those with Russian entities. In the 115th Congress, Republicans voted 18 times to block Democratic resolutions seeking the tax returns.