Photo by Allison Shelley/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is threatening to delay the confirmation hearing of President-elect Donald Trump’s Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson if Tillerson does not provide three years of his tax returns.
In a letter to fellow Democrats on the committee, Cardin notes the importance of looking at Tillerson’s tax returns given his long career in the private sector during which he worked with numerous foreign governments and which has never come under the scrutiny of a congressional committee before.
“Until all of these materials are received and staff has had a chance to review them, it will be difficult to lock in a nomination hearing time for the Committee to consider the nominee,” Cardin wrote to the other nine Democrats on the panel.
According to a senior Democratic aide familiar with the communications between the committee’s Democrats and the Trump transition team, Chairman Bob Corker informed Cardin on Tuesday morning that the ExxonMobil CEO was refusing to provide his tax returns to the committee.
“Unless there was a case where there’s some irregularity that’s known, the committee just does not ask for tax returns,” Corker told the Washington Post that day.
While Cardin, as the committee’s ranking member, does not have the authority to block the hearing from going forward, it is longstanding tradition for the chairman and the minority to agree to most committee proceedings before they are scheduled.
Corker said Thursday that Tillerson is “currently ahead of schedule in providing information to the committee,” and that prior to his hearing, he “will go through the same ethics and FBI checks as previous Secretary of State nominees. That has always been the plan, it is already in progress, and I am deeply disappointed my colleagues continue to imply otherwise.”
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