In a significant defeat for Donald Trump, the supreme court on Monday declined to step in to halt the turnover of his tax records to a New York state prosecutor.
The court’s action is the apparent culmination of a lengthy legal battle that had reached the high court once before.
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The former president’s tax records are not supposed to become public as part of prosecutors’ criminal investigation, but the high court’s action is a blow to Trump because he has long fought on so many fronts to keep his tax records shielded from view.
The investigation the records are part of could also become an issue for Trump in his life after the presidency. Trump has called it “a fishing expedition” and “a continuation of the witch-hunt – the greatest witch-hunt in history”.
The supreme court waited months to act. The last of the written briefs in the case was filed on 19 October. A court that includes three Trump appointees waited through the election, Trump’s challenge to his defeat and a month after Trump left office before issuing its order.
The court offered no explanation for the delay, and the legal issue before the justices did not involve whether Trump was due special deference because he was president.
The court’s order is a win for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, who has been seeking Trump’s tax records since 2019. Vance, a Democrat, subpoenaed the records from the Mazars accounting firm that has long done work for Trump and his businesses. Mazars has said it would comply but Trump sued to block the release.
Vance’s office had said it would be free to enforce the subpoena and obtain the records in the event the supreme court declined to step in and halt the records’ turnover, but it was unclear when that might happen.
In a statement on Monday, Vance said only: “The work continues.”
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case the high court ruled in involves a grand jury subpoena for more than eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax records. Vance has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records. In one court filing last year, prosecutors said they were justified in demanding the records because of public reports of “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization”.
Part of the investigation involves payments to two women – the adult film star and director Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal – to keep them quiet during the 2016 presidential campaign about alleged affairs which Trump denies.
In July, the justices in a 7-2 ruling rejected Trump’s argument that the president is immune from investigation while he holds office or that a prosecutor must show a greater need than normal to obtain the tax records.
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Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump nominated, joined that decision. It was issued before Trump’s third nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
As part of its July decision, the high court returned the Vance case and a similar case involving records sought by Congress to lower courts. The court prevented the records from being turned over while the cases proceeded.
Since the high court’s ruling, in the Vance case, Trump’s attorneys made additional arguments that his tax records should not be turned over but lost again in federal court in New York and on appeal. Trump had sought to put those rulings on hold.
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