Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told lawmakers on Tuesday that a White House lawyer communicated with Treasury Department lawyers before they received a request from House Democrats for President Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Mnuchin was testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Treasury budget request when he was asked by the Democratic chairman, Rep. Mike Quigley, about whether he had spoken with White House officials about the request.

“I have not spoken to the White House chief of staff or the president about this decision,” Mnuchin said, but later added that there had been communications between the two legal teams, which he described as “purely informational.”

Mnuchin later defended the president’s decision to not release his tax returns, saying that Trump has complied with financial disclosures and that the decision to release tax returns is an “individual decision.”

“There is a requirement for presidents to have financial disclosure. I believe this president has complied with that, as other people, and the general public when they elected President Trump made the decision to elect him without his tax returns being released,” Mnuchin said.

“I am sure there are many prominent Democrats who are relieved that when Kevin Brady was chairman of the (House Ways and Means) committee that he didn’t request specific returns. But anyway, it is a pleasure to be here with you today,” Mnuchin said.

Mnuchin appeared on Capitol Hill one day before the Wednesday deadline Democrats gave the IRS commissioner to respond to Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal’s request, which Mnuchin said Treasury’s legal department was still reviewing. “It is our intent to follow the law,” he said.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has said Democrats will “never” get their hands on copies of Trump’s tax returns.

IRS commissioner Charles Rettig is being asked to provide Neal with six years of the president’s personal and business filings. When making the request, Neal pointed to a law from the 1920s that empowers three members of Congress to review the documents of any U.S. taxpayer.

A senior Democratic Ways and Means aide told ABC News on Monday that the chairman has not heard any sort of response from the IRS or Treasury Department regarding his request, but still maintained the expectation was that the IRS would comply by Wednesday.

“But,” the aide added, “we’ll see.”

On Sunday, Mulvaney predicted Democrats will “never” obtain the documents, days after Trump said he was not inclined to cooperate and stressed that voters “litigated” the issue by electing Trump in 2016.

“Voters knew the president could have given his tax returns, they knew that he didn’t and they elected him anyway, which is, of course, what drives the Democrats crazy,” Mulvaney said on Fox News on Sunday. “But they know they’re not going to get this.”

An obscure 1924 provision in the tax code allows the chairmen of certain Congressional committees to privately examine anyone’s tax returns to conduct an investigation. If obtained, the returns could be released to the full House of Representatives with a majority vote from that committee, effectively making them public.

This scarcely used measure dates back to the 1920s Teapot Dome bribery scandal during President Warren G. Harding’s administration. It was invoked in the 1970s to investigate tax fraud by President Richard Nixon and again in 2014 to investigate whether the IRS discriminated against certain conservative groups.

A legal challenge is widely expected, and Neal could invoke his committee’s subpoena power to press the issue if Rettig misses Wednesday’s deadline.

Mnuchin will sit for his annual testimony at the House Financial Services Committee, where Chairwoman Maxine Waters is holding a hearing on the state of the international financial system.

Rettig testifies on Wednesday at the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on the 2019 tax filing season and the 21st century IRS.

Both hearings provide Democrats with opportunities to ask about Trump’s tax returns, though the request is not the subject of either hearing.

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