The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to prevent a New York grand jury from receiving President Donald Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, a decisive defeat in his protracted legal battle to keep his tax records out of his hands. researchers.
The decision does not mean that the returns will be made public soon and may never be made public. Under state law, materials handed over to a grand jury must be kept secret. But Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance can now demand that Trump’s accountants hand over the records that the president vehemently refused to hand over to prosecutors or Congress.
“The work continues,” said Vance in response to the Supreme Court order.
Trump issued a long statement condemning the order as the continuation of a politically motivated witch hunt and promised “to continue fighting”.
“The Supreme Court should never have allowed this ‘fishing expedition’ to happen, but it did,” the statement said. “This is something that has never happened to a president before, it is all inspired by Democrats in a totally democratic place, New York City and State, completely controlled and dominated by an enemy of mine, Governor Andrew Cuomo.”
Vance is seeking tax returns covering eight years for a grand jury investigation into secret money payments and other financial transactions. The investigation began after it was reported that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $ 130,000 to keep his allegation that she had an affair with Trump, a claim the former president denied.
Cohen also claimed to Congress that the Trump organization sometimes lied about its financial condition to evade taxes or obtain favorable loan terms.
In July, the Supreme Court dismissed Trump’s claim that, as incumbent president, he is immune to any part of the criminal justice system – including grand jury investigations. But the ruling said he could return to the lower courts and present the same arguments to anyone trying to defeat a subpoena.
A month later, a federal judge in New York ruled against Trump’s renewed effort to have the subpoena rejected, describing the legal attack as a reworked version of his original immunity argument. The US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision.
Trump’s legal team said the subpoena was broad in scope and issued in bad faith to harass him. If all Vance was looking at was payments made by Cohen, they said, that would not explain why Vance simply copied a much broader subpoena issued by a Congressional committee.
The first subpoena issued by a state for the records of an incumbent president should have been properly adapted, they told the Supreme Court.
“Its almost limitless reach – in time, scope and geographical reach – has all the characteristics of a fishing expedition,” his lawyers told the Supreme Court. “And the fact that the subpoena was issued to a third party custodian while tensions were mounting between the Trump Organization and the prosecutor, and for dubious reasons of efficiency, just makes the allegation of bad faith much more plausible.”
But in recent lawsuits, Vance has hinted that the scope of his work may be broader than just secret money payments.
“The investigation involves a variety of business transactions and is based on information from public sources, confidential informants and the grand jury case” and may include falsification of business records, insurance fraud and tax fraud, Vance told the appeals court.
Now that the Supreme Court has paved the way for Vance to comply with the subpoena, the president has exhausted his legal options to block it. The complete tax return documents, or parts of them, would only be made public if Vance brought a criminal action at some future date and sought to present them as evidence.
Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, said it was aware of the Supreme Court order and “remains committed to fulfilling all of our professional and legal obligations.”
The company added that it could not publicly discuss the services it provides to customers without their consent or as required by law.
Tom Winter contributed.