Documents will be subject to the grand jury confidentiality rules that restrict their public disclosure.
The decision is a bitter loss for Trump, even though tax records are protected from public disclosure, after he consistently argued that the subpoena issued by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance was overblown and issued in bad faith.
This means that the grand jury’s investigation into alleged secret money payments and other issues will no longer be hampered by Trump’s struggle to keep the documents secret.
The decision was issued without comments or disagreements.
Last July, the Supreme Court, voting 7-2, dismissed Trump’s broad allegations of immunity from a state criminal subpoena seeking his tax returns and said that as president he was not entitled to any kind of high standard unavailable to citizens. common. The judges sent the case back to the lower court so that the president could make more targeted objections to the scope of the subpoena.
In October, a federal appeals court said that “there is nothing to suggest that these are everyday documents, typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”
Trump’s personal lawyers then took the case back to the Supreme Court, urging the judges to suspend the lower court’s decision while the judges considered whether to accept the appeal.
“The subpoena is geographically extensive, temporally extensive and topically unlimited – all the attributes that raise suspicion of an illegal fishing expedition,” wrote William Consovoy. “Even if disclosure is confined to the grand jury and prosecutors,” he said, “once the documents are delivered” confidentially “they will be lost forever.”
The subpoenas cover documents from January 2011 to August 2019, including their tax returns, from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars. The documents refer to the employment of former Trump lawyer by the Trump Organization, Michael Cohen, and the cash payment that Cohen allegedly made to two women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Trump.
This story has been updated with additional information.