Supreme Court must hold fast on Trump taxes
The following editorial appeared in the New York Daily News:
No, the president of the United States cannot defy a legally legitimate grand jury subpoena for his tax returns. So unanimously affirmed a three-judge appeals panel in Manhattan federal court, dealing what should be the final blow to the preposterous and offensive claims made over many months now by one Donald J. Trump.
Cy Vance seeks to obtain
Trump’s financial records via his accountants, Mazars USA, as part of an investigation into both illegal hush-money payments and other irregularities. Because of its third-party nature, the request places no burden on the president. Trump’s attorneys characterize the Manhattan DA’S move as a fishing expedition out to spear a White House whale.
The appeals court handily rejected that claim, stating, “there is no logic to the proposition that the documents sought in the Mazars subpoena are irrelevant to legitimate state law enforcement purposes simply because a Congressional committee considered the same documents relevant to its own investigative purposes.”
“The claim of overbreadth is not plausibly alleged for two interrelated reasons. 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
— based on the types of documents sought, the types of entities covered, and the time period covered by the subpoena, as well as the subpoena’s near identity to a prior Congressional subpoena — fall short of meeting the plausibility standard.”
In other words, Trump’s attorneys have been blowing smoke. A desperate president will now seek relief at a Supreme Court which rebuffed his first attempt. It must stand for the rule of law again.
Trump’s attorneys characterize the Manhattan DA’S move as a fishing expedition out to spear a White House whale.