Supreme Court again rejects Trump’s bid to shield tax returns, other financial records from Manhattan prosecutor
By Robert Barnes
Feb. 22, 2021 at 2:58 p.m. GMT
washingtonpost.com
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected former president Donald Trump’s last-chance effort to keep his private financial records from the Manhattan district attorney, ending a long and drawn-out legal battle.
After a four-month delay, the court denied Trump’s motion in a one-sentence order with no recorded dissents.
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has won every stage of the legal fight — including the first round at the Supreme Court — but has yet to receive the records he says are necessary for a grand jury investigation into whether the president’s companies violated state law.
The current fight is a follow-up to last summer’s decision by the high court that the president is not immune from a criminal investigation while he holds office.
“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in that 7 to 2 decision.
But the justices said Trump could challenge the specific subpoena, as every citizen may, for being overbroad or issued in bad faith.
A district judge and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York found neither was the case.
Trump’s complaints “amount to generic objections that the subpoena is wide-ranging in nature,” the unanimous 2nd Circuit panel wrote. “Again, even if the subpoena is broad, the complaint does not adequately allege that it is overbroad. Complex financial and corporate investigations are broad by default.”
Similarly, the panel said, “we hold that none of the president’s allegations, taken together or separately, are sufficient to raise a plausible inference that the subpoena was issued out of malice or an intent to harass.”
Vance is seeking eight years of the former president’s tax returns and related documents as part of his investigation into alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years before. Trump denies the claims.
Investigators want to determine whether efforts were made to conceal the payments on tax documents by labeling them as legal expenses.
But Vance says there are other aspects of the investigation that have not been publicly disclosed. Court filings by the prosecutors suggest the investigation is looking into other allegations of impropriety, perhaps involving tax and insurance fraud.
Trump’s lawyers told the Supreme Court both of the lower court decisions were faulty. The subpoena was not narrowly tailored, but instead based on one issued by congressional committees. It would cross the line even if it was “aimed at ‘some other citizen’ instead of the president,” wrote Trump’s lawyers William S. Consovoy and Jay Alan Sekulow.
“The court of appeals not only ignored how the district court stacked the deck against the president,” the petition continues. “But it also broke every rule and precedent applicable” to the legal procedure at issue, it said.
Consovoy said it should be easy for the court to at least temporarily put the lower court rulings on hold and hear his case, which in the court’s language is called granting certiorari.
“The President of the United States requests the opportunity to seek certiorari before his confidential financial records are disclosed to the grand jury and potentially the public,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “Once the records are produced, the status quo can never be restored.”
The appeals court panel shot down his claim that the district attorney’s investigation is limited only to the alleged payments made by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. It said that “bare assertion … amounts to nothing more than implausible speculation.”
Vance and his lawyers have said the records are needed for a grand jury investigation, and pledged at the Supreme Court hearing that they would not be released publicly. Since those battles, the New York Times has published a number of stories about Trump’s tax payments and mounting debt based on records it says it has obtained.
“Similarly,” the ruling says, “the President’s allegations of bad faith fail to raise a plausible inference that the subpoena was issued out of malice or an intent to harass.”
Vance is seeking the records from Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars. In his response to the Supreme Court in the current fight, Vance said that the “obvious explanation for the subpoena’s breadth … is that the investigation had extended beyond the Cohen payments.”
Vance said in his brief to the court that, since the subpoena was first issues more than a year ago, it was time to let the investigation run its course.
“Applicant has had multiple opportunities for review of his constitutional and state law claims, and at this juncture he provides no grounds for further delay,” Vance wrote. “His request for extraordinary relief should be denied, and the grand jury permitted to do its work.”
Headshot of Robert Barnes
Robert Barnes
Robert Barnes has been a Washington Post reporter and editor since 1987. He joined The Post to cover Maryland politics, and he has served in various editing positions, including metropolitan editor and national political editor. He has covered the Supreme Court since November 2006.Follow
washingtonpost.com |
