WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday opened the way for New York prosecutors to obtain eight years of tax returns from former President Donald Trump, delivering a major blow to Trump in his search for years to block an investigation of the grand jury on their subjects.
The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s latest challenge to the subpoena without fanfare, issuing an order for a sentence that denied his request to suspend a lower court decision that ruled out the latest version of his case. No court publicly indicated that they had disagreed with the order.
The New York district attorney’s office, Cy Vance Jr., subpoenaed eight years of Trump’s income tax returns as part of a grand jury investigation into a wide range of Trump’s business and personal finance, including – but not limiting to – silent cash payments orchestrated by Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen of two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump before he became president. The order serves as a reminder of the legal exposure that Trump continues to face now that he is out of office, and the fact that as a former president, he can no longer invoke that position as a shield if Vance or any other agency law enforcement bring criminal charges against him.
The Supreme Court’s latest order does not mean that the public will have the opportunity to view the documents, at least not immediately; grand jury investigations are conducted in secret. If Vance’s office ever opened a criminal case involving tax returns, that information could be made public.
The Supreme Court ruled against Trump and the Justice Department last summer when the case reached the judges, but Trump then tried to seek another version of his case in the lower courts. A federal district judge in New York rejected the decision, and the US Circuit 2 Court of Appeals upheld the decision in October, which released New York prosecutors to execute the subpoena. Trump asked the Supreme Court to delay the effect of the 2nd Circuit decision while taking the fight back to the judges, and the judges denied the request on Monday.
“The work continues,” Vance said in a statement.
Vance’s office wrote a letter to Trump’s lawyer William Consovoy in September, making it clear that if the Supreme Court denied Trump’s request to suspend any lower court decisions, they would “be free” to execute the subpoena. Consovoy did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
The tax order was not Trump’s only loss to the Supreme Court on Monday. Judges brought a formal end to Trump’s legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s electoral victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, issuing brief orders that denied Trump’s petitions that challenged lower court decisions against him. The court also refused to challenge the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision before election day in November, which allowed the state to accept ballots sent by mail that arrived up to three days later; Judges Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch disagreed, saying they would have heard the case.
Trump won a victory on Monday – the judges refused to relive a defamation case against him filed by Stormy Daniels, the adult movie star who claimed to have had an affair with Trump and received one of the secret payments through Cohen. Daniels sued Trump after he tweeted that she was lying when he said someone threatened her not to talk about the affair with Trump. The 9th Circuit closed the case after finding that Trump’s tweet was an opinion that could not be the subject of a defamation complaint, and Daniels asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Trump was the first president since Richard Nixon to not voluntarily release his tax returns during his campaign. The New York Times obtained information from more than two decades of his tax returns, including his first two years as president, and reported that the documents showed “an entrepreneur who makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year but accumulates chronic losses that he employs aggressively to avoid paying taxes. “
When Cohen testified before Congress in February 2019, he not only described how Trump repaid him for silent payments during his presidential campaign, but also stated that Trump had at different times inflated or deflated asset values to get better loans or reduce his fiscal exposure, respectively. Cohen also said that Trump told Cohen about getting a $ 10 million tax refund during the financial crisis in the late 2000s and called the government stupid for doing so.
The New York grand jury issued a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA LLP, in August 2019, seeking Trump’s tax returns dating back to 2011. Trump filed a lawsuit the following month in federal court. He was represented by a private legal team, but as the case progressed, the Justice Department was also involved to support the then president’s challenge to the subpoena.
Trump has repeatedly lost in court. The New York district judge dismissed the case in October 2019, and the 2nd Circuit ruled the following month that Trump was not entitled to “presidential immunity” against criminal investigation while in office. Trump took the case to the Supreme Court and the judges agreed to prevent Vance’s office from executing the subpoena while the case was pending. In a July 2020 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., most judges rejected Trump’s full immunity argument. The Justice Department did not support Trump’s immunity position, but argued that prosecutors should have to meet a higher standard of “need” to seek records related to an incumbent president, and the majority of the Supreme Court rejected that too .
Roberts’ opinion left open the possibility that Trump could raise other arguments to challenge the grand jury subpoena. Trump tried to do just that, filing a new version of his lawsuit in the New York federal court that focused on arguments that the subpoena was too broad and that prosecutors were suing it in “bad faith”. The judge was not persuaded and closed the case in August. The 2nd Circuit confirmed the rejection in October, and that was when Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene again.
Vance’s office confirmed in lawsuits that the investigation goes beyond secret money payments and delves into Trump’s business. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors had subpoenaed records related to the assessment of Seven Springs, a Trump property located in Westchester, New York. The New York attorney general’s office also has an ongoing investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial properties and operations.
The New York Times reported last week that Vance’s office brought in a former federal prosecutor with significant experience in white collar and organized crime cases to join the investigation of Trump, his family and his companies.