Supreme Court orders release of Trump taxes

Former president criticizes decision in New York case

The defeat for the former president means the Manhattan district attorney can get the documents as part of an investigation. The scope of that probe isn’t clear, but court records indicate it is looking into potential insurance and tax fraud.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-ditch 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 court’s order was a decisive defeat for Trump, who had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his tax returns and related documents secret. There were no dissents noted.

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.”

The former president criticized the court’s action.

“The Supreme Court never should have let this ‘fishing expedition’ happen, but they did,” Trump said in a statement. “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.

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 is not known.

It arose partly from an investigation by his office into hushmoney payments to two women who said they had affairs with Trump, relationships the president has denied.

But court filings by prosecutors suggested that 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.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump promised to disclose his tax returns, but he never did.

Instead, he fought hard to shield the returns from scrutiny, for reasons that have been the subject of much speculation.

In 2019, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New York, ruled that state prosecutors may require third parties to turn over a sitting president’s financial records for use in a grand jury investigation.

Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.

In July, the justices 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.

Though Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from other aspects of the decision, all nine justices agreed with that proposition.

But the court 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.”