Earlier this month, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Richard Neal formally asked the Internal Revenue Service to provide six years of Donald Trump’s personal tax returns, and the returns of some of his businesses, to Democrats seeking to review his financial dealings and possible conflicts of interest, of which there are allegedly many. The White House responded by suggesting it’d sic Attorney General William “No obstruction” Barr on the case, while chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News Sunday it’d be a dark day in hell before Democrats saw his boss’s returns. In reality, the decision is not actually up to Trump, the White House, or the president’s outside counsel, but the I.R.S. and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. (And, if nobody can get along, possibly the Supreme Court.) Luckily for Trump, Mnuchin appears ready to prove his loyalty.

Testifying on Capitol Hill, the Treasury chief told lawmakers Tuesday that, prior to receiving Neal’s letter, the White House had been in touch with his department for an “informational” discussion about what it might do in the event that Congress requested Trump’s returns, a turn of events that one Democrat called “deeply troubling,” considering the White House isn’t supposed to weigh in on that decision. (At a separate hearing, Mnuchin said he did not view the meetings as “interference.”) And while the former foreclosure king said it was his department’s “intent to follow the law”—which, incidentally, says he “shall furnish” the Ways and Means Committee with “any return or return information . . . requested”—he’s not totally sure Democrats have a case here. After all, Americans voted for Trump without seeing his tax returns, and apparently should have assumed he was lying when he promised to release the information at the conclusion of a routine audit that, should it exist, does not actually preclude him from making them public:

. . . when pressed by House Democrats, Mr. Mnuchin suggested he believed that Congress was overreaching its authority and defended Mr. Trump’s right not to release his tax returns.

“The general public when they elected President Trump made the decision to elect him without his tax returns being released,” Mr. Mnuchin said, adding that the president complied with requirements to release a financial disclosure form.

Mnuchin, one of Trump’s most reliable lackeys, then tried to argue that an attempt to obtain tax returns for supposedly political purposes would hurt both parties and allow lawmakers to access the records of their political enemies, noting that Representative Kevin Brady, who served as the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means committee during the Obama administration, never made such a request of the 44th president. “I am sure there are many prominent Democrats who are relieved that when Kevin Brady was chairman of the committee that he didn’t request specific returns,” Mr. Mnuchin said.

Of course, there may have been a reason that Brady never demanded Obama’s tax returns, that reason possibly being that Obama voluntarily released his returns for every year between 2000 and 2015. But never mind you that!