Supreme Court tells Trump he’s not above law
The Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s claim of legal immunity from outside scrutiny of his financial records Thursday and said New York prosecutors can seek release of Trump’s tax returns for their criminal investigation of hush money payments. The court also said Congress may try to obtain the documents but has not yet provided an adequate justification for doing so.
Despite the 72 rulings, both written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the last day of the court’s term, there is little prospect the records will be made public before election day, if ever. Lengthy legal proceedings would be needed to determine whether congressional committees could obtain the documents and disclose them, while New York prosecutors want to show the records to a grand jury whose proceedings are confidential.
But the court’s refusal to shield Trump from prosecutors’ demand for his records was a stinging rebuke to the first president in more than 40 years to refuse to disclose his tax returns.
“In our judicial system, the public has a right to every man’s evidence,” Roberts said in the opening words of his opinion. “Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the president of the United States.”
The court ordered the New York case returned to a lower federal court to consider any additional arguments against disclosure. But no further claims of presidential immunity will be allowed, only arguments that the prosecutors’ demands are abusive — based on a “personal vendetta” or other badfaith conduct, said Michael Graetz, a Columbia University law professor.
“The public interest in fair and effective law enforcement cuts in favor of comprehensive access to evidence,” Roberts said.
Dissenting Justice Samuel
Alito said the ruling in the New York case “threatens to impair the functioning of the presidency and provides no real protection against the use of the subpoena power by the nation’s 2,300+ local prosecutors.”
Trump tweeted that the court’s ruling meant he had to “keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!”
The standard will be more demanding in the congressional case. Three committees controlled by the House’s majority Democrats say they want financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, and from two banks that had loaned money to Trump’s businesses. The committees said they wanted to look into the adequacy of federal ethics laws and into whether Trump, as a candidate, borrowed money or did business with Russians.
The court did not say those purposes were improper, but said Congress must explain their connection to proper legislative goals, like passing laws or investigating government wrongdoing. And Roberts said lower courts that had approved release of the records had failed to adequately weigh “the unique position of the president” against Congress’ legitimate role in considering and enacting laws.
“The court did not give Trump the absolute immunity he wanted, but it did provide more protection than the congressional committees wanted,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley.
“They’ve got to prove (the records are) essential in investigating the president,” Graetz said.
Dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas said the court’s standards were still too weak.
“Congress has no power to issue a legislative subpoena for private, nonofficial documents — whether they belong to the president or not,” he wrote.
Nan Aron, president of the liberal advocacy group Alliance for Justice, said, “It’s now up to the lower courts to properly enforce these decisions to hold this president accountable for violating the law. Trump’s delay tactics won’t protect him forever.”
Joel Paul, a constitutional law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco, called the two rulings “a wellcrafted judicial compromise” that allowed both sides to claim partial victories. It was also “an assertion of judicial independence,” he said.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has sought nearly 10 years of business and personal tax records from the president’s accounting firm, Mazars, for a grand jury investigation of possible crimes committed in the payment of hush money to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years ago.
Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, has said Trump repaid him $130,000 for the payment to Stephanie Clifford, a former pornographic film star who performed as Stormy Daniels, and $150,000 to reimburse the National Enquirer for a hush payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Trump has denied the relationships but has not said why he would have paid the women for their silence. He acknowledged the $130,000 payment to Clifford on Twitter in 2018.
His lawyers argued that the president was legally immune from grand jury subpoenas while in office. But Vance’s office said the Supreme Court had rejected that argument in 1997 when it unanimously denied immunity to President Bill Clinton from a sexual harassment lawsuit by Paula Jones, a state employee in Arkansas while Clinton was the state’s governor. Clinton settled the suit for $850,000 in 1998.
Roberts’ ruling Thursday cited the Clinton case, the court’s 1974 ruling requiring President Richard Nixon to disclose the Watergate tapes, and even the 1807 ruling allowing former Vice President Aaron Burr, who had initially been charged with treason, to demand documents from President Thomas Jefferson. Chief Justice John Marshall, who presided over Burr’s trial, rejected Jefferson’s argument that he could not be required to provide evidence or testify and said the president was “of the people.”
Presidents are normally under no legal obligation to make their tax returns public, unless they are facing subpoenas like those issued to Trump’s recordkeepers. But every president and majorparty candidate has released their returns since Nixon reluctantly did so in December 1973, nine months before he resigned from office while facing impeachment.
At times, Trump has said he cannot disclose his returns because he is regularly under audit by the Internal Revenue Service. However, an IRS audit poses no legal barrier to disclosure, and Nixon was being audited when he made his returns public.
Although no records will be available immediately, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DSan Francisco, said the court “has reaffirmed the Congress’ authority to conduct oversight on behalf of the American people, as it asks for further information from the Congress.”
The cases are Trump vs. Vance, 19635, and Trump vs. Mazars, 19715.