President Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court on Tuesday asking it to block a subpoena forcing the president to release his tax returns.
If granted, the stay would temporarily block a grand jury subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office that would force the president to hand over years of financial records, including his tax returns.
A federal appeals court rejected the president’s challenge to the subpoena on Oct. 7 and sided with New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance.
“We find that the claim of overbreadth is not plausibly alleged for two interrelated reasons,” the appeals court judges wrote. “First, the President’s bare assertion that the scope of the grand jury’s investigation is limited only to certain payments made by Michael Cohen in 2016 amounts to nothing more than implausible speculation. Second, without the benefit of this linchpin assumption, all other allegations of overbreadth … fall short of meeting the plausibility standard.”
The request is a temporary stay and gives Trump’s legal team an opportunity to request a hearing with the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court.
The Supreme Court already took up Trump’s case once. In July, the court ruled 7-2 that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office could obtain the president’s taxes and other financial information from Mazars USA, Trump’s longtime accounting firm.
“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 said when delivering the majority opinion. “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.”
In that ruling, the court told Trump that he needed to make new arguments for why the subpoena was issued in bad faith, according to CNBC.
Trump’s lawyers used that hearing in their emergency application for a stay.
“The Court remanded this case so that the President could make further arguments challenging the Mazars subpoena,” they wrote. “The President should have the chance to seek certiorari on those serious claims as part of ‘the normal course of appellate review.'”
Trump’s team said it is confident that the Supreme Court will take up the case.
“This court rarely denies review when a President seeks certiorari. And it has never denied review when a president claims, as here, that he is being subjected to unlawful legal process,” Trump’s legal team said.
Vance has agreed not to enforce the subpoena until after the Supreme Court decides whether it will take up the case, according to CNBC. The district attorney wants the records as part of its investigation into the Trump Organization and how it handled hush money payments made to women who said they had sex with Trump.
New York Times reporters said in September that they obtained years of Trump’s tax data and published several articles about its content. Among other assertions, the New York Times reported that Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017.
