WASHINGTON (TIP): Wells Fargo and TD Bank have turned over President Trump’s financial records to the House Financial Services Committee, Fox News confirmed on Thursday, May 23, amid a contentious legal battle between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats seeking access to sensitive files.

The committee, led by Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., is one of several panels that have issued subpoenas and requests for Trump’s financial files.

NBC News first reported that Wells Fargo turned over a few thousand documents to the committee, and TD Bank provided a handful.

The banks are two of the nine financial institutions with which congressional Democrats are seeking cooperation. The push has led to an escalating legal battle on multiple fronts.

On Wednesday, May 22,  a federal judge in New York ruled that two other banks, Deutsche Bank and Capitol One, were required to comply with congressional subpoenas seeking access to Trump’s financial records.

The House Financial Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee both have requested the documents from Deutsche Bank and Capitol One in their investigations of possible “foreign influence in the U.S. political process.”

“We remain committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations and will abide by a court order regarding such investigations,” Deutsche Bank said in a statement to Fox News after the ruling.

Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means Committee is seeking the president’s tax returns and has issued subpoenas for the files.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he would not comply with the subpoena for the president’s tax returns last week, but this week, a confidential draft IRS memo was revealed calling the disclosure “mandatory” unless the president asserts executive privilege over the financial documents.

The Washington Post first reported on the 10-page memo, which does not mention Trump by name, but appears to add a new level of pressure to the White House. Mnuchin, though, has maintained that the Democrats’ requests for Trump’s tax returns “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” and said his department will not “disclose the requested returns and return information.”

The IRS on Wednesday, May 22, pushed back on that report, stating the memo does not represent an official position for the agency.

The standoff between the congressional Democrats and the administration is likely to lead to a court battle, with Trump reportedly indicating he’s prepared to fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

Trump declined to reveal his tax returns during the 2016 presidential election, claiming he was under audit. Political candidates aren’t required to disclose their tax returns, though traditionally all candidates do.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s fight to stop the release of his financial records is on the fast track for a key court decision after a three-judge appellate panel agreed Thursday to hear oral arguments later this summer, according to a May 23 Politico report.

In a two-page order, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ judges scheduled oral arguments for July 12 in the case that pits the president’s attorneys against House Democrats, who issued a subpoena to the accounting firm Mazars USA for eight years of Trump’s financial records.

The court date will come several weeks after a lower court rejected the president’s attempts to block the subpoena, arguing that the request was politically motivated. Trump’s lawyers immediately appealed the ruling, and the president called the opinion “ridiculous” and “totally wrong,” and noted Judge Amit Mehta was an appointee of President Barack Obama.

In the next round of legal sparring, Trump will go before a panel of judges that includes another Obama appointee, Patricia Millett, as well David Tatel, a Bill Clinton appointee, and Neomi Rao, who joined the D.C. Circuit in March as a Trump appointee.

Under the order approved Thursday, Trump’s first round of legal briefs spelling out its arguments are due June 10, followed by a response from lawyers for the House committee and Mazars by July 1. A final reply brief from the Trump attorneys is due July 9.

Democrats have said they will suspend the deadlines in their subpoena for production of the Trump financial documents while the president’s appeal works its way through the courts. Mazars, meantime, has said it will still keep working to collect and prepare the documents but won’t turn over any until the judges’ render an opinion.

House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) sent the subpoena to Mazars last month as part of the panel‘s investigation into whether Trump committed financial crimes before he became president.

The panel’s focus has been on trying to corroborate claims made by Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who earlier this year gave the committee documents purporting to show Trump artificially inflated and deflated the value of his assets for his personal financial benefit.

(Source: FOX News / Politico / News Agencies)