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Trump Says Subpoena for His Tax Returns Is Illegal ‘Harassment’
Nicole Hong and Benjamin Weiser 2 hrs ago

President Trump, in a new court filing seeking to block the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., from obtaining eight years of his tax returns, said on Monday that the efforts amounted to illegal harassment.

Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie standing in front of a building: President Trump has been trying to stop Manhattan prosecutors from obtaining his tax returns for almost a year.© Erin Schaff/The New York Times President Trump has been trying to stop Manhattan prosecutors from obtaining his tax returns for almost a year.
The argument came in response to a filing last week by Mr. Vance’s office, which said prosecutors had a wide legal basis to subpoena the tax records and other financial documents. The office suggested it was investigating the president and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a significantly broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past.

In their new filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers questioned the true scope of the investigation and wrote that even if Mr. Vance’s office were conducting a sprawling inquiry into financial crimes, the subpoena was still too broad.

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“If anything, it shows that the district attorney is still fishing for a way to justify his harassment of the president,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote.

They noted that the subpoena asked “for every document and communication related to the president and his businesses over about the last decade” and simply copied a congressional subpoena seeking the same information.

The filing was the latest salvo in a nearly yearlong fight between Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance, a Democrat.

Mr. Vance issued the subpoena last August to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, seeking eight years of his personal and business tax returns and other financial records.

Until recently, the district attorney’s inquiry appeared largely focused on hush-money payments made in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

But in a court filing last week, Mr. Vance’s office suggested for the first time that its investigation was focused on possible fraud. The office cited undisputed “public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” the president’s company.

The investigation has been stalled by Mr. Trump’s repeated attempts to block the subpoena. He first sued last year, arguing that a sitting president was immune from criminal investigation.

The case reached the Supreme Court, which last month ruled against Mr. Trump by a vote of 7 to 2.

“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.

But the decision opened the door for Mr. Trump to return to the lower court and raise other objections to the subpoena.

In a filing last month that reopened the arguments, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that Mr. Vance’s subpoena had been issued in bad faith and was “wildly overbroad.”

“The Mazars subpoena is so sweeping,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote, “that it amounts to an unguided and unlawful fishing expedition into the president’s personal financial and business dealings.”

A senior official in Mr. Vance’s office recently told the judge overseeing the proceedings, Victor Marrero of Federal District Court in Manhattan, that the tax returns were “central evidence” in its investigation.

The New York Times reported that last year Mr. Vance’s office also had issued a separate subpoena to Deutsche Bank, the president’s longtime lender, seeking records that Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization provided to the bank when he sought loans. The bank complied with the request, The Times reported.

Even should Mr. Vance obtain the president’s tax returns, they are not likely to become public in the foreseeable future. They would be shielded by grand jury secrecy and might only surface if charges were later filed and they were introduced as evidence in a trial.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-says-subpoena-for-his-tax-returns-is-illegal-harassment/ar-BB17MYCU?li=BBnb7Kz