In a filing submitted Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to dismiss a suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month that seeks to enforce subpoena requests, The Wall Street Journal reports. The House of Representatives argues that Congress is lawfully permitted to ignore requests to hand over records and testimony to the executive branch agency.
Earlier this year the SEC issued subpoenas to the House Ways and Means Committee and its top health-care aide, Brian Sutter, as part of an investigation into whether anyone in Congress passed information to Wall Street traders about a change in health-care policy before it was publicly announced on April 1, 2013. The agency is interested in conversations between Sutter and Mark Hayes, a lobbyist at Greenberg Traurig, and officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that made the decisions, The Wall Street Journal reports.
