Trump Sues 2 Banks To Block Democrats From Investigating His Finances

President Trump has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to keep two banks from responding to congressional subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown with Democrats eager to investigate his finances.

The president, his three oldest children and his business, The Trump Organization, say the investigations by the House intelligence and Financial Services committees are overbroad and serve no purpose beyond harassment.

The suit, filed Monday, says the subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Capital One have no purpose but "to rummage through every aspect of [President Trump's] personal finances, his businesses, and the private information of the President and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage. No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one."

Since taking control of the House, Democrats have promised to look deeply into the Trump family's finances, and Deutsche Bank has promised to cooperate with the investigation.

Deutsche Bank was one of the few, if only, major banks to lend to Trump after his casino bankruptcies in the early 1990s.

Trump's suit says the subpoenas amount to overreach because much of the information sought predates his election "and encompasses reams of account records for entities, individuals, children, and spouses who have never even been implicated in any probe."

In a joint statement, Chairwoman Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee and Chairman Adam Schiff of the intelligence committee said the suit was "only designed to put off meaningful accountability as long as possible."

"As a private businessman, Trump routinely used his well-known litigiousness and the threat of lawsuits to intimidate others, but he will find that Congress will not be deterred from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities," the statement said. [Copyright 2019 NPR]