The Supreme Court will announce Thursday whether congressional committees and a New York prosecutor are entitled to see President Trump’s personal financial records, after the president has waged an intense legal battle to keep the material secret.
All concern Trump’s long-running legal fight to shield years of income tax returns from public view and keep his private financial records from the hands of Democratic-led House committees and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.
The court’s decisions will carry major implications for the limits of presidential power and accountability, and could affect the fall election.
Two of the cases, Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank, concern the attempts of three House committees to bypass the president to obtain his financial records from his longtime accounting firm and financial institutions. The committees say they are needed to check the president’s financial disclosures and inform whether conflict-of-interest laws are tough enough.
In Trump v. Vance, the president is attempting to stop subpoenas from a grand jury Vance is supervising. He is looking into whether corporate records were altered in violation of state laws to cover up hush-money payments. He, too, is seeking the information from a third-party.
The cases are similar in that they are seeking much the same information. Included are Trump’s tax returns, which every president since Jimmy Carter has made public but Trump has steadfastly guarded.
But they also seek much more. The congressional committees “demand information about seven business entities, as well as the personal accounts of President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump,” said the brief filed by the president’s private lawyers, Jay Sekulow and William S. Consovoy.
The congressional subpoenas followed testimony from Trump’s former fixer, attorney Michael Cohen, who told lawmakers that Trump had exaggerated his wealth to seek loans. Two committees subpoenaed Capital One and Deutsche Bank as part of their investigation into Russian money laundering and potential foreign influence involving Trump.
Federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C. — at the district court and appeals court levels — moved swiftly by court standards and repeatedly ruled against Trump and to uphold Congress’s broad investigative powers.
In Washington, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in October rejected Trump’s assertion that Congress’s subpoena was an unconstitutional attempt to harass the president that lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose.”
The appeals court upheld a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta, who wrote, “It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present — even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York substantially agreed in saying Vance’s subpoena was valid.
President Trump made it official: The U.S. is pulling out of the World Health Organization. President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has tested positive. Hong Kong appears to have entered a third wave of infections.
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The Trump administration sends formal notification that the U.S. will withdraw from the W.H.O. next year, July 2021.
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, tests positive. He has been a skeptic of precautions.
At least five Republican senators will skip their party’s convention. The fight over a drug supported by President Trump enters a new round. Hong Kong, a model of virus prevention, confronts a ‘third wave’ of infections.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, cautioned on Tuesday that it was a “false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death,” which President Trump, top White House officials and several governors have stressed in recent days.
Dr. Fauci’s comments came at an event Tuesday with Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, as the United States surpassed three million cases on Tuesday, and some states that had hoped to be getting back to normal by now have instead been forced to reinstate restrictions and issue mandatory mask orders.
“By allowing yourself to get infected because of risky behavior, you are part of the propagation of the outbreak,” he said. “There are so many other things that are very dangerous and bad about this virus. Don’t get yourself into false complacency.”
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, conceded that officials had been surprised by its recent spread, especially among young people.
“None of us really anticipated the amount of community spread that began in really our 18-to-35-year-old age group,” Dr. Birx said in a brief appearance on an Atlantic Council panel. “This is an age group that was so good and so disciplined through March and April. But when they saw people out and about on social media, they all went out and about.”
The rate of new cases was rising quickly as the nation hit the three million mark, according to a New York Times database. Half a million new cases have been reported since June 26. Cases have risen in 37 states over the past two weeks, and this week the nation has been averaging roughly 50,000 new cases a day — double what it did in mid-June. And though President Trump dismissed the severity of the outbreak over the weekend, falsely claiming that “99 percent” of cases were “totally harmless,” leading health officials remain concerned.
On Tuesday, at least six states — Texas, California, Hawaii, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma — set single-day records for new cases; Texas recorded more than 9,200 cases. At least three — Arizona, Mississippi and Texas — reported their highest daily death totals of the pandemic.
People under 40 have made up a significant portion of new cases recorded in states with recent outbreaks, a sign of how the virus has spread in bars, restaurants and offices that have reopened.
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