Doug Letter in Washington, D.C. Jan. 11, 2018.

The House on Tuesday shot back at the Department of Justice’s filing urging a D.C. federal appeals court to strike down a congressional subpoena for President Donald Trump’s financial records, labeling the arguments at odds with U.S. Supreme Court precedent and “fabricated out of whole cloth.”

In a 27-page filing signed by House general counsel and DOJ veteran Douglas Letter, attorneys representing the House Oversight and Reform Committee were unbridled in their criticism of the DOJ brief backing the president’s arguments against the subpoena.

“Without acknowledging this history, the department urges this Court to intrude on the U.S. House of Representatives’ exercise of its Article I power in ways that are flatly inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent,” said the brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The House attorneys highlighted past times the chamber requested and received documents or testimony in the course of investigations relating to the president, beginning with George Washington’s 1792 acknowledgement that the lawmakers could request information from his office.

“Presidents from George Washington on (unlike Mr. Trump) have understood that Congress has the power to conduct investigations and oversight of the president as part of the constitutional design,” the filing reads.

They took particular aim at the DOJ’s claims the subpoena should be dismissed because the House needed to “clearly authorize” the request. They also took issue with DOJ’s suggestion that the circuit panel examine whether the subpoenaed information is “important to Congress’s investigation.”

“These arguments are fabricated out of whole cloth: they may represent what the department wishes the law were, but they are not the law,” the filing said.

Letter, who spent 40 years at Main Justice, reiterated his stance that the case did not raise separation of powers issues because it was directed toward Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, and not the president himself.

The brief further criticizes DOJ’s suggestion that the court “create a demanding test that would limit congressional investigations relating to the president” by asking lawmakers to provide a legislative purpose for the subpoena “such that courts could ‘concretely review the validity of any potential legislation’ and determine whether the information ‘is pertinent and necessary.’”

“The department cites no law supporting this novel concept because there is none,” the lawyers added.

The Justice Department publicly took sides in the subpoena fights between the House and Trump for the first time earlier this month, at the request of the D.C. Circuit panel. The judges heard oral arguments in the case last month, and at the time questioned why DOJ was not involved.

The government attorneys sided with Trump’s personal lawyers’ claims that allowing the subpoena to be enforced would create an undue burden for the president, and may be a form of law enforcement.

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, issued the subpoena to Mazars for Trump’s tax records as part of House Democrats’ sweeping investigations into the president.

Trump sued in his personal capacity to block the subpoena. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta of the DIstrict of Columbia ruled earlier this year to uphold the document request, and the matter is now being weighed by Judges David Tatel, Patricia Millett and Neomi Rao of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Trump’s attorneys at Consovoy McCarthy celebrated the Justice Department’s brief in its own response to the filing Tuesday.

“This court asked the United States whether the committee’s subpoena to Mazars for the president’s records is valid,” the Trump filing said in its opening lines. “The United States responded with a definitive no.”

The attorneys argued that past subpoenas for presidential records were issued through special congressional committees, and that the House Oversight Committee unilaterally sending the request to a third party “raises constitutional red flags.”

The brief also hinted that the matter could make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, writing that for “this case or in the future, the Supreme Court might need to assess whether a congressional subpoena to a third party for a president’s records in and of itself violates the separation of powers.”

And it pointed to DOJ’s suggestion of potential law enforcement on the part of House Democrats as further bolstering Trump’s own arguments against the subpoena.

“If anyone knows what is and isn’t law enforcement, it’s the Department of Justice,” the filing reads.

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