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Donald Trump proclaimed for months on the campaign trail that he could not release his tax returns because they were being audited by the IRS. He'd let everyone see them, he vowed, after the audit. “Absolutely,” he said at one of the presidential debates.

Those secret tax returns—they still have not been released—are the centerpiece of a case being argued Thursday in a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court. A panel of judges will decide whether the Internal Revenue Service can be forced to publicly release Trump's tax returns through the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center brought the suit against the IRS last year and lost in the trial court. The IRS does have the power, in limited circumstances, to release a private taxpayer's returns. But the judge said neither route—one includes the president himself giving approval—had been established.

Judge James Boasberg

“What plaintiff wants in this case is to peer into another person's income-tax records. Although the court has no reason to doubt EPIC's assertion that the return information on this particular individual—President Trump—would be of interest to the public, that fact does not give the organization a viable legal case,” Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in his August 2017 ruling.