The Supreme Court cleared the way for a New York prosecutor to obtain former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, dealing a massive loss to Trump who has fiercely fought to shield his financial papers from prosecutors.
The documents will be subject to grand jury secrecy rules that restrict their public release.
The ruling is a bitter loss for Trump, even if the tax records are shielded from public disclosure, after he consistently argued that the subpoena issued by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance was overbroad and issued in bad faith.
It means that the grand jury investigation into alleged hush money payments and other issues will no longer be hampered by Trump’s fight to keep the documents secret.
Scotusblog on the history and scope of this case:
The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for a New York grand jury to obtain former President Donald Trump’s financial records. Over four months after Trump asked them to intervene, the justices turned down a request by the former president to stay a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that permits Cyrus Vance, the district attorney for Manhattan, to enforce a subpoena to Mazars USA, the president’s longtime accountant. Monday’s order means that Vance and the grand jury likely will finally acquire eight years of Trump’s tax returns and other related records, although grand jury secrecy laws may preclude them from becoming public.
The court’s order came in a dispute that began in 2019, when Vance issued a subpoena to Mazars as part of a state grand jury’s investigation into criminal violations of New York law. The investigation includes a probe into hush-money payments that were made to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. A federal district court in New York and the 2nd Circuit rebuffed the president’s request to quash that subpoena, prompting Trump to appeal to the Supreme Court. The justices ruled in July that the president is not categorically immune from state criminal subpoenas, but they sent the case back to the lower courts to allow the president to challenge the subpoena on other grounds…
Trump filed his reply brief on Oct. 19, but the justices did not act on Trump’s request for over four months – an unusually long time for an emergency request to put a lower-court ruling on hold. In a brief notation as part of the “orders in pending cases” section of Monday’s regularly scheduled order list, the court indicated only that Trump’s request to block the subpoena had been denied. The court did not explain the reason for the delay in acting on Trump’s plea, nor did it indicate how the justices had voted.
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 Mr. Trump and his companies, and it recently published a series of articles about them.
Mr. 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…
Mr. Vance’s lawyers — including Carey R. Dunne, who argued the case the first time around; Walter E. Dellinger III, a former acting United States solicitor general in the Clinton administration; and Michael R. Dreeben, a former longtime deputy solicitor general and a member of the team that assisted Robert S. Mueller III in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election — pointed to the Times articles. The cat, they said, was out of the bag.
“The New York Times has obtained his tax-return data and described that data in depth in a series of articles,” Mr. Vance’s brief said. “With the details of his tax returns now public, applicant’s asserted confidentiality interests have become highly attenuated if they survive at all. And even assuming any remain, they cannot justify extraordinary relief from this court that would deprive the grand jury alone of facts available to anyone who reads the press.”
“This litigation has already substantially hampered the grand jury’s investigation,” the brief said.