President Trump and Deutsche Bank had a long, symbiotic relationship. Now, Mr. Trump is racing to prevent the bank from sharing his financial information with Congress.
Over two decades, Deutsche Bank lent Donald J. Trump billions of dollars, even as his tarnished financial record put him off limits for most of Wall Street.
“You are a great friend,” Mr. Trump wrote to his Deutsche Bank contact in 1998. “We have a great relationship,” he said in 2013. “They are totally happy with me,” he declared three years later.
Now, Deutsche Bank is putting the president on the defensive.
Lawyers for the bank have spent months cooperating with investigators from two Democratic-controlled congressional committees, which issued what one lawmaker called a “friendly subpoena” to the bank in mid-April. The bank could end up sharing decades of his personal and corporate financial records.
That prospect prompted Mr. Trump to file a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan on Monday in an attempt to block Deutsche Bank and another financial company, Capital One, from sharing documents. Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the subpoenas had no legitimate purpose and were an attempt to pry into his finances for political gain.
The heads of the two committees that issued the subpoena, Representatives Maxine Waters and Adam B. Schiff, called the suit “meritless” and an attempt to obstruct congressional oversight.
The rich trove of records held by Deutsche Bank includes internal corporate documents, descriptions of the value of Mr. Trump’s assets, and portions of his personal and business tax returns. The subpoena, issued April 15, casts a wide net for documents related to Mr. Trump’s businesses and other entities, including family trusts.
If the bank handed over even parts of Mr. Trump’s returns, it would be a dramatic end run around the president, who broke with decades of precedent by refusing to release them during the 2016 campaign.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit puts the financially ailing Deutsche Bank in an awkward situation. The German lender’s share price has fallen substantially over the past decade, and politicians and regulators in Germany are pushing for it to make radical changes to reduce its riskiness and improve profitability.
