Trump in last-ditch bid to halt release of tax records as Supreme Court to rule
Outcome could affect 2020 election as judges hear case by phone
financial documents are valid.
The president is advancing broad arguments to try to stymie House Democrats. In the case involving the criminal investigation launched by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr, Mr Trump is asserting that while he holds office he cannot even be investigated.
His Supreme Court arguments draw on law review articles that will be very familiar to one member of the court.
“At the end of the day, ‘a president who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as president,’”
Mr Trump’s lawyers told the court, quoting from a 2009 article by now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The Trump-appointed Kavanaugh previously worked on independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, which led to Mr Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. He was acquitted by the Senate the following year.
Mr Kavanaugh is quoted five times in Mr Trump’s main Supreme Court brief in the
Vance case. Justice Neil Gorsuch is Mr Trump’s other highcourt appointee.
Mr Trump has so far lost at every step, but the records have not been turned over pending a final court ruling.
The case about congressional subpoenas has significant implications regarding a president’s power to refuse a formal request from Congress. In a separate fight at the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, over a congressional demand for the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn, the administration is making equally broad arguments that the president’s close advisers are “absolutely immune” from having to appear.
The House argues that Congress has very broad subpoena powers and that courts should be reluctant to interfere with them. “Many momentous separation-of-powers disputes have come before this Court,” the House wrote in its primary Supreme Court brief. “This dispute... is not one of them.”
In two earlier cases, the justices acted unanimously in requiring president Richard Nixon to turn over White House tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor and in allowing a sexual harassment lawsuit against Mr Clinton to go forward.
In those cases, three Nixon appointees and two Clinton appointees, respectively, voted against the president who chose them for the high court. A fourth Nixon appointee, William Rehnquist, sat out the tapes case because he had worked closely as a Justice Department official with some of the Watergate conspirators whose upcoming trial spurred the subpoena for the Oval Office recordings.
The subpoenas are not directed at Mr Trump himself. Instead, House committees want records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One, as well as the Mazars USA accounting firm. Mazars also is the recipient of Mr Vance’s subpoena.
Two congressional committees subpoenaed the bank documents as part their investigations into Mr Trump and his businesses. Deutsche Bank has been one for the few banks willing to lend to Mr Trump after a series of corporate bankruptcies and defaults starting in the early 1990s.
Mr Vance and the House Oversight and Reform Committee sought records from Mazars about Mr Trump based on payments that Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged to keep two women from airing their claims of affairs with Trump during the 2016 presidential race.