The Wall Street Journal is reporting that even though Trump and his Attorney General/personal concierge Bill Barr have been refusing all congressional subpoenas for Trump's business and financial records, as multiple committees investigate alleged wrongdoing ranging from campaign-trail hush money payments to tax evasion to bank fraud, Congress and New York state investigators are both having success in getting many of those documents from the banks involved in those Trump transactions. Cooperating banks include Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and others.
Trump may have an attorney general willing to reinterpret laws as needed in order to block investigations by Congress, but the banks don't quite have that same level of obstruction powers, nor is it in their benefit to get into a pissing match with lawmakers during a time when many of the top 2020 presidential candidates are calling out those banks as needing strict new oversight and reforms. Several—looking at you here, Deutsche Bank—have been mired in other criminal probes to an extent that they may especially want to bend over backward on this one. None of them are so devoted to Trump, a relative minnow in the world of high finance, that they would risk themselves on his behalf.
Deutsche Bank, in particular, is also cooperating with a New York civil probe of the Trump Organization; New York Attorney General Letitia James has reportedly obtained emails, loan documents, and other material from the bank.
What's not yet clear is whether any of the “thousands of pages” turned over have turned up evidence verifying the wrongdoing Trump has been accused of by longtime lawyer Michael Cohen and by investigative reports into Trump's tax and loan histories. But the documents should provide, at the very least, enough of a look into Trump's financial doings to suggest where congressional investigators should turn next.
It also remains unlikely that the courts will turn a blind eye to the Trump-Barr claims of "total" immunity from congressional investigation that the White House is currently using to keep Trump's tax returns hidden, bar witnesses from testifying, and refuse to turn over other documents. Even if the courts grant Trump some of those concessions, declaring that the investigation is now an impeachment inquiry would give Congress wide latitude to investigate any scrap of Trump's financial doings that drew their interest. Even, yes, if the Republican-controlled Senate did not go along.
