The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
High court: Release Trump tax records
Accountants will submit returns, more sought by Manhattan prosecutors.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a lastditch attempt by former President Donald Trump to shield his financial records, issuing a brief, unsigned order requiring Trump’s accountants to turn over his tax and other records to prosecutors in New York.
Trump had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his tax returns and related documents secret.
About the case
The case concerned a subpoena to Trump’s accountants, Mazars USA, by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat. The firm has said it will comply with the final ruling of the courts, meaning that the grand jury should receive the documents in short order.
Vance issued a three-word statement in response to the court’s order: “The work continues.”
What the taxes showed
Under grand jury secrecy rules, it would ordinarily be unclear when, if ever, the public would see the information. But The New York Times has obtained more than two decades of tax return data of Trump and his companies, and it recently published a series of articles about them.
Trump, the articles said, has sustained significant losses, owes enormous debts that he is personally obligated to repay, has avoided paying federal income taxes in 11 of the 18 years The Times examined and paid just $750 in both 2016 and 2017.
The scope of Vance’s inquiry remains unclear. It arose partly from an investigation by his office
into hush-money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Trump, relationships he has denied. But court filings by prosecutors suggest they are also investigating potential crimes like tax and insurance fraud.
The subpoena sought tax records and financial statements since 2011, engagement agreements with the accountants who prepared them, the underlying raw financial data and information about how the data were analyzed.
In July, the Supreme Court soundly rejected Trump’s central constitutional argument against the subpoena — that state prosecutors are powerless to investigate a sitting president.
“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 for the majority in that decision.
How the justices decided
Though Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from other aspects of the decision, all nine justices agreed
with that proposition.
The majority gave Trump another opportunity to challenge the subpoena, on narrower grounds.
“A president may avail himself of the same protections available to every other citizen,” Roberts wrote. “These include the right to challenge the subpoena on any grounds permitted by state law, which usually include bad faith and undue burden or breadth.”
Trump did just that, but his arguments were rejected by a trial judge and a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York.
“Any documents produced under the Mazars subpoena would be protected from public disclosure by grand jury secrecy rules,” the panel said in an unsigned opinion, “which greatly reduces the plausibility of the allegation that the district attorney is acting out of a desire to embarrass the president.”
“There is nothing to suggest,” the panel added of the information sought, “that these are anything but run-of-the-mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”