Court battle dragging

Prosecutor to judge; Delay is president’s strategy

Manhattan DA accuses Trump of delaying release of his tax returns.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office accused President Donald Trump Thursday of dragging out a court battle over a subpoena seeking eight years of his tax returns in an attempt to effectively shield himself from criminal investigation.

Carey R. Dunne, a lawyer for the prosecutor’s office, told a federal judge that the longer the president disputes the subpoena, the higher the chance that the statute of limitations would expire for any possible crime that may have been committed.

The office is seeking the president’s personal tax returns and those of his family business, the Trump Organization, as part of an investigation into hush-money payments made in the runup to the 2016 election. The president has been fighting the subpoena for nearly a year.

“What the president’s lawyers are seeking here is delay,” Dunne said. “I think that’s the entire strategy here.

The prosecutor’s assertion came during a virtual hearing held before the judge, Victor Marrero, of U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Trump’s lawyers did not respond directly to the accusation in court’.

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said later in an email, “Our strategy seeks due process.”

The district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, issued the subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August.

Trump initially fought the subpoena last year arguing that a sitting president was immune from a state criminal investigation. Marrero oversaw that case and ruled against the president, and his decision was upheld by an appeals court.

Thecasewenttothe Supreme Court, which last week also rejected the president’s argument. Still, the high court left open the possibility that Trump could raise new objections to the subpoena.

The case was sent back to Marrero, who called for the hearing this week so that both sides could outline their positions.

At the hearing, a lawyer for the president, William

S. Consovoy, made it clear Trump was likely to raise challenges to the scope of the subpoena, which Consovoy characterized as “widely overbroad,” and to raise the question of whether there was a political motivation in issuing it.

Consovoy also said the president should be able to learn more about the district attorney’s investigation, which largely has been kept secret, and suggested it was unfair for him to have to challenge a subpoena without having access to “at least some information about its nature and scope.”

At the hearing, Marrero noted that in his ruling last year rejecting the president’s claim of immunity, he found that the district attorney was not acting in bad faith.

In arguing that the delay could prevent a grand jury from considering evidence before any statutes of limitations ran out, Dunne said that the president was effectively getting the immunity from criminal inquiry that the Supreme Court denied him. Other people and entities could also escape scrutiny, Dunne said.

Trump’s lawyers must outline their new objections to the subpoena by July 27, and Vance can then respond.