8/20/2020
Donald Trump has fought tooth and claw to keep from having his tax records made public. On Thursday, a federal judge struck down another attempt to protect his records from a subpoena.
It's just one more battle in an ongoing war. Trump's case against the subpoena went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled against him in July in regards to a criminal inquiry underway in New York. SCOTUS said that the President doesn’t have "absolute immunity" to prosecution.
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| Trump has tried to have the courts toss the annoying subpoena. |
The inquiry appears to involve fraud that took place before Trump was elected.
(As you may recall, the second part of that SCOTUS ruling said that the House could not have Trump's tax returns, because the information they needed was available elsewhere.)
After the Supreme Court ruling, Trump's lawyers found two more fig leaves in the law that allowed them to appeal -- again -- to block the subpoena for Trump's financial records. The records are held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, so the subpoena is called the Mazar Subpoena. Technically, a grand jury requested the subpoena, which was issued in September of 2019.
(As you'll recall, Trump fired New York's Federal Court Southern District attorney general, Geoffrey Berman, in June when rumor held that Berman was close to pursuing charges against Trump. Berman's deputy took over his post.)
The current inquiry -- including the Mazar subpoena -- is not a Federal case. Instead, it is led by New York County (i.e., Manhattan) District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., and involves violations of state law.
The Federal judge in Thursday's ruling, US District Judge Victor Marrero, drove his point home with strong language. The appeal, he wrote, was
"...as unprecedented and far-reaching as it is perilous to the rule of law and other bedrock Constitutional principles on which this country was founded and by which it continues to be governed."
WITHIN AN HOUR, Trump's lawyers had filed another appeal, this time with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, asking for emergency help to stop the subpoena from being enforced next week.
One can only conclude that whatever is in those records must be awfully bad for Trump.
"Donald Trump" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
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