Supreme Court denies Trump’s final bid to block release of financial records
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.
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.
The former president criticized the court’s action. “The Supreme Court never should have let this ‘fishing expedition’ happen, but they did,” Trump said. “This is something which has never happened to a president before; it is all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat location, New York City and state, completely controlled and dominated by a heavily reported enemy of mine, Gov. Andrew Cuomo.”
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.
The scope of Vance’s inquiry is not known. It arose partly from an investigation by his office into hush-money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Trump, relationships the president has denied. But court filings by prosecutors suggested they are also investigating potential crimes like tax and insurance fraud.
In July, the justices soundly rejected Trump’s central constitutional argument against the subpoena – that state prosecutors are powerless to investigate a sitting president.
Trump then challenged the subpoena, on narrower grounds, but his arguments were rejected by a trial judge and a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York.
Trump’s lawyers then filed an “emergency application” asking the Supreme Court to intercede.
“Even if the disclosure of his papers is limited to prosecutors and grand jurors, the status quo can never be restored once confidentiality is destroyed,” their brief said. “But the harm will be more than irreparable if the records are publicly disclosed. It will be casemooting – the strongest possible basis for a stay.”
In response, Vance’s lawyers pointed to New York Times articles. The cat, they said, was out of the bag.