President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as he travels to Minnesota from the southern lawn of the White House in Washington, USA, on October 10, 2019.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump’s tax records have been handed over to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the former president’s effort to keep the documents protected.
A Vance spokesman, Danny Frost, confirmed that a subpoena was filed Monday against the longtime accounting firm in Mazars, USA, hours after the nation’s top court rejected Trump’s appeal.
The subpoena required Trump’s personal and corporate records dating back to 2011, including his tax returns. Trump rejected the modern precedent by refusing to release his tax returns to the public, even when he organized two campaigns for the presidency.
A spokesman for the former president did not comment immediately on Thursday. After the court allowed the transfer, Trump pledged to “keep fighting” and said Vance was pursuing a “fishing expedition.”
Long-term research has been closely monitored. Early reports suggested that the DA was studying financial payments made on Trump’s behalf to women alleging issues with the real estate mogul. Trump denied the allegations.
More recent court records have indicated that Vance may be investigating Trump and his eponymous company, The Trump Organization, for possible bank and insurance fraud. Trump has repeatedly rejected allegations of financial inadequacy and accused investigators of partisan motives.
Trump’s fight for tax documents reached the Supreme Court twice. Both times, the group refused to stop lower court rulings taking sides with Vance. In July, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion for a 7-2 court that rejected Trump’s general argument that he was immune from statewide criminal investigations while in office.
“In our judicial system,‘ the public has a right to the trial of all men. ’From the earliest days of the Republic,‘ all men ’have included the president of the United States,” said Roberts, who was appointed to court by then-President George W. Bush.
Following this ruling, Trump’s lawyers continued to fight the subpoena on the grounds that it was excessively broad and issued in bad faith, but lower courts rejected those claims. In October, Trump’s lawyers again asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but the court wrote Monday in a single-line order that it would not.
Vance’s possession of Trump’s tax records does not guarantee that the public will ever learn what it contains. Records were obtained in connection with a grand jury investigation and New York state law requires that grand jury proceedings be kept confidential. Probably the only way for the public to see the records is if Vance finally files charges and includes part of the records in the upload documents.