A federal judge rejected President Trump’s challenge to a Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena for his financial records, including his tax returns, a month after the president’s loss at the Supreme Court.
Less than 75 days until Election Day, Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York released a 103-page ruling on Thursday siding with Cyrus Vance, the district attorney of New York County, and tossing out the president’s efforts to continue the fight at the district court level by dismissing the Trump legal team’s effort to push for a second amended complaint in the protracted legal battle.
“The concept of temporary absolute immunity would bear adverse consequences for the fair and effective administration of justice. Theoretically, if reelected, a President could be in office for eight years, perhaps longer in the case of a President who assumes office to fill a vacancy in the presidency. For a prosecutor to wait until then to obtain vital records necessary for an investigation of potential criminal conduct would risk that key witnesses would no longer be available and that their memories of the events would have significantly dimmed,” Marrero said. “In that event not only the President but also any private individual accomplices implicated in serious crimes could escape being brought to justice, while potentially innocent persons snared in the scandal may be unable to gain official exculpation.”
Trump’s legal team quickly filed an emergency notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Trump’s lawyers also asked the district court for a stay pending their appeal.
“Earlier today, this Court granted the District Attorney’s motion to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint. The President respectfully disagrees with that decision and believes there is a likelihood of reversal on appeal,” Trump attorney William Consovoy said in a six-page motion. “But what matters most at this point is that, absent a stay, the subpoena will be enforced before the President has been afforded any appellate review of his overbreadth and bad-faith claims. Given the seriousness of this dispute, the status quo should be preserved so that the Second Circuit and Supreme Court can hear the President’s claims. Consideration for ‘the Presidency itself’ requires at least that much.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office issued a court filing in earlier August that appears to show that it is investigating potential bank and insurance fraud in the Trump Organization.
Prosecutors did not explicitly identify the focus of their investigation but say that “undisputed” news reports about the organization’s business conduct provide a legitimate basis for their subpoena seeking the president’s financial records. Those reports claim that Trump inflated his net worth and the values of his properties to lenders and insurers. The president’s legal team asserts that he did nothing wrong.
“In light of these public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization, there was nothing facially improper (or even particularly unusual) about the Mazars Subpoena, which issued in connection with a complex financial investigation, requesting eight years of records from an accounting firm,” Vance said.
“The President holds a unique position in the country’s constitutional system, and hence merits utmost respect to check unjustified encroachment on presidential powers and duties, and so prevent impairing the President’s ability to discharge executive branch functions,” Marrero noted Thursday. “But special standing within the governmental scheme at times could come into conflict with other basic principles; it cannot equate under all circumstances to special privilege and special treatment of the President much greater than legally or practically justifiable, and far beyond the official standards applied to govern the affairs of ordinary citizens.”
The Supreme Court ruled in July that the president must allow the state of New York to examine his financial records as part of a grand jury criminal investigation. The case, Trump v. Vance, pertains to the district attorney for New York County asking for eight years’ worth of Trump’s personal tax returns in connection with a grand jury investigation. The documents are material for which the president may not claim executive privilege.
In late July, Trump’s attorneys argued in court that Vance’s subpoena “is wildly overbroad and is not remotely confined to the grand jury investigation that began in 2018.” They also said that the subpoena “demands voluminous documents that relate to topics and entities far beyond the district attorney’s limited jurisdiction under New York law” and that “this is not a properly tailored subpoena for the president’s records.” Trump’s legal team further argued that Vance’s subpoena “was issued in bad faith.”
“The district attorney knew when he issued it — and he has since admitted — that the subpoena was not designed to meet the needs of the grand jury. It was drafted by a congressional committee purportedly to investigate issues of national concern,” Trump’s lawyers said. “In other words, the district attorney issued a grand jury subpoena he knew was overbroad and sought irrelevant records. That the district attorney dubiously claims he did this for ‘efficiency’ reasons does not save the subpoena from invalidation. It confirms that he lacked a ‘good faith’ basis and that the subpoena amounts to harassment of the president.”
Marrero said on Thursday that “rulings by this Court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals repudiated the President’s temporary absolute immunity theory” and “on further appeal, the United States Supreme Court similarly rejected the President’s arguments.”
“Justice does not require granting leave to replead under these circumstances,” Marrero said. “Justice requires an end to this controversy.”
The Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 decision that “Article II and the Supremacy Clause do not categorically preclude, or require a heightened standard for, the issuance of a state criminal subpoena” to a sitting president.
“Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that 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 Roberts wrote. “We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the president is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.”
“This is all a political prosecution,” Trump tweeted after that ruling. “I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!”
The New York prosecutor is seeking the documents as part of an investigation into potential state crimes relating to hush-money payments made to pornographic star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. The president’s legal team has argued that the Constitution’s supremacy clause prevents investigations into a sitting president, a notion with which lower courts have disagreed.
