The documents are subject to rules of jurisdiction of the jury restricting their release.
The ruling is a bitter loss for Trump, even if the tax records are protected from public disclosure, after he consistently argued that the summons issued by District Attorney Cyrus Vance of Manhattan was too broad and issued in bad faith.
This means that the grand jury investigation into alleged hush money payments and other issues will no longer be hampered by Trump’s struggle to keep the documents secret.
Trump’s legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although Trump’s personal attorneys may continue to fight their appeal in the case, the fact that the documents will be released by Trump’s long-term accounting firm, Mazars, ends.
Last July, the Supreme Court, which voted 7-2, rejected Trump’s broad claims of immunity against a summons from a state criminal of his tax returns, saying he as president is not entitled to any kind of increased standard that does not for ordinary citizens is not available. The judges returned the case to the lower court so that the president could make more purposeful objections to the scope of the summons.
In October, a federal appeals court said “there is nothing to suggest that this is anything other than current documents that are usually relevant to a major jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”
Trump’s personal lawyers then took the case back to the Supreme Court and asked the judges to draft the lower court’s decision while the judges considered accepting the appeal.
“The summons is geographically extensive, temporarily extended and locally unlimited – all features that give rise to the suspicion of an illegal fishing expedition,” wrote William Consovoy. “Even if the disclosure is limited to the grand jury and prosecutors,” he said, “once the documents are handed over ‘confidentially’, they will be lost forever.”
The subpoenas span documents from January 2011 to August 2019, including his tax returns, from Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars. The documents relate to the Trump organization’s employment of Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, and hush money payment that Cohen allegedly made to two women who claim she had extramarital affairs with Trump.
This story has been updated with additional information.