President Trump’s accountants will have to hand over years of financial records and tax returns after the Supreme Court ruled that he did not have immunity from a grand jury investigation in New York.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, will be permitted to see the returns.
The justices voted 7-2 in the first of two opinions released on Thursday, examining the limits of presidential power and the contours of congressional oversight.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s two appointees to the court, joined the majority.
However, Trump prevailed in the second case as the justices said it would not allow Congress to obtain tax and financial records, kicking the issue back to the lower courts.
Even so, the president took to Twitter to express his fury.
Courts in the past have given “broad deference”. BUT NOT ME!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
“This is all a political prosecution,” he wrote. “I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!”
Delivering the court’s majority opinion in the Manhattan case, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding. We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the president is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.”
Claire Finkelstein faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, said the two opinions – that the president was not above the law, but that Congress must also better justify its demand for presidential documents and respect the separation of powers – were a powerful, non-partisan demonstration of the rule of law.
“One of things to focus on here is that Kavanaugh went along with the majority in the Vance case, and that’s important because Kavanaugh seemed to be the person whom the president thought he could most trust to be on his side,” she said. “And that’s a measure of how strong the principle is that the president is not above the law. Kavanaugh had to recognize that.”
Unlike other recent presidents, Trump has refused to publish his tax returns and other financial papers that would provide a snapshot of his wealth.
During three hours of oral testimony in May, conducted by teleconference, lawyers tussled over whether the House of Representatives and a New York prosecutor were allowed to subpoena Trump’s banks and accounting firm for his financial documents.
Three House committees are seeking records from Mazars, accountants to the Trump Organization, and two banks that made loans to the Trump businesses. Democratic members believe the documents may provide insight into whether Trump borrowed money from, or dealt with, Russian companies before taking office.
Patrick Strawbridge, representing Trump, said during oral arguments before the court in May that the subpoenas went far beyond any legitimate legislative investigation.
“The power that they are seeking and the burden they will impose in the aggregate on the president will reshape and transform the balance of the separation of powers,” he said.
During arguments, Kavanaugh summed up the question facing the court as: “How can we both protect the House’s interest in obtaining information it needs to legislate but also protect the presidency?”
In the second case, the Manhattan district attorney was seeking eight years of records from Mazars as he investigated whether financial documents were falsified to disguise payments to two women, former Playboy model Karen McDougal and pornographic film star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow, who also defended the president during his Senate impeachment trial, argued his client was entitled to “temporary presidential immunity” while he was in office. To do otherwise would be a distraction, he said, to a president battling the coronavirus pandemic.
However, the justices during the presentations before the court returned to the precedents of Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, cases used heavily in the lower courts that ruled against Trump, to suggest that the argument was not enough to dismiss a case.
Chief Justice John Roberts said in the case of Clinton v. Jones: “We were not persuaded that the distraction in that case meant that discovery could not proceed.”
And Justice Elena Kagan was more succinct when Trump’s lawyers insisted he was not a mere ordinary citizen. “The president isn’t above the law,” she said.
Carey Dunne, appearing for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said the court had long held that presidents were duty-bound to provide evidence in law enforcement investigations.
“When a president acts as a private individual, he or she has responsibilities like every other citizen, including compliance with legal process,” said Dunne.
