Prosecutor gets Trump tax records
A New York prosecutor has obtained copies of Donald Trump’s tax records after the Supreme Court this week rejected the former president’s lastditch effort to prevent them from being handed over.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office enforced a subpoena on Trump’s accounting firm within hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday and now has the documents in hand.
District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr had been fighting for a year and a half for access to Trump’s tax records for a criminal grand jury investigation into his business dealings. The documents are protected by grand jury secrecy rules and will not be made public.
Vance is conducting a wideranging investigation that includes an examination of whether Trump or his businesses lied about the value of assets to gain favourable loan terms and tax benefits.
Vance is also scrutinising hushmoney payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf.
Trump has called Vance’s investigation “a fishing expedition” and “a continuation of the witch hunt — the greatest witch hunt in history”.
Vance is leading the investigation along with his general counsel, Carey Dunne who made arguments on behalf of the office at various appellate court hearings. Vance recently hired former mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz as a special assistant district attorney to assist in the probe.
Vance’s subpoena sought from Mazars USA not only the final versions of Trump’s tax returns, but also draft versions of those returns and “any and all statements of financial condition, annual statements, periodic financial reports, and independent auditors’ reports” held by the company.
The Mazars subpoena also sought engagement agreements that define the accountants’ role in creating the tax returns and financial statements; source documents providing the accountants with raw financial data; and work papers and communications between the firm and Trump representatives.
Those would include communications showing how the raw data was analysed and treated in the preparation of the records.
The New York Times separately obtained years of Trump’s tax data and published stories last year detailing some of his finances, including that he paid just US$750 in federal income tax in 2017 and no income tax in 11 of 18 years because of major losses.