US President Donald Trump arrives to address reporters on the 2020 US presidential election results in the Brady Press Briefing Room in the White House in Washington, USA, November 5, 2020.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
The Supreme Court on Monday issued a final bid from former President Donald Trump to dismiss his financial records, including years of his tax returns, from the hands of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.
The ruling, the second time the country’s highest court has refused to block a grand jury summons for the confidential records, was announced in an order without being noticed.
The legal battle over Trump’s financial records, including personal and business documents dating back to 2011, comes in connection with an investigation by Vance’s office into possible tax violations.
The news further puts the former president in jeopardy, facing investigations in New York and elsewhere.
The district attorney is also investigating the silent money payments on behalf of Trump to two women who said they had affairs with him. Trump has denied their claims.
While Vance’s investigation was apparently focused on that, court records and news reports suggest prosecutors are now investigating more serious allegations.
A court indicted by Vance last summer indicated that the investigation could potentially track the possible “insurance and bank fraud by the Trump organization and its officials.” In another case, a month later, prosecutors suggested they investigate Trump for potential tax crimes.
Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, told Congress in 2019 that Trump improperly inflated and deflated the value of his fixed assets for tax and insurance purposes.
It appears that Vance’s documentation refers to Cohen’s testimony. One prosecutor quoted a New York Times report as saying Trump was working on “dubious tax systems during the 1990s, including cases of utter fraud.”
By the end of 2020, Vance’s investigators are seeking records from three towns in Westchester County, NY, as part of the investigation. The records relate to Trump’s 213-acre Seven Springs Estate site, which is spread across the towns.
That property is one of several Trump assets that New York Attorney General Letitia James is monitoring as part of a civil investigation into whether the Trump organization improperly inflated and deflated the value of certain properties to derive financial benefits from them. .
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Vance’s office is also monitoring loans taken out by Trump on Trump Tower in Fifth Avenue and three other properties in Manhattan: 40 Wall Street, the Trump Plaza apartment building and the Trump International Hotel and Tower.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Vance wrote: “The work continues.”
In a combo photo, actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, is speaking in New York City and US President Donald Trump on April 16, 2018 and April 28, 2018 in Washington, Michigan, respectively.
Reuters
A Vance spokesman Danny Frost said the office would not comment further, but said it would act quickly to enforce its subpoena on the president’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA.
Representatives of the former president did not immediately return requests for comment.
In a statement, Cohen said: “The Supreme Court has now announced that no one is above the law. Trump will have to take responsibility for his own dirty deeds for the first time.”
The decision comes three days after The New York Times reported that Vance’s office retained a former federal prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, with extensive experience in dealing with white-collar fraud cases, to work on the Trump investigation.
And that comes two days after Reuters reported that Vance’s office had issued a subpoena to the New York Tax Commission.
People familiar with the municipal agency told the outlet that they expect the subpoena to claim income and expense statements that Trump’s company would have filed as part of requests for a reduction in commercial property tax applications. The lower the fixed value that a property has, the less the owner has to pay property tax on it.
Joseph Tacopina, a leading New York defense attorney, told CNBC last week that Vance’s persistence in the search for the tax records indicates that he strongly believes they will show criminal behavior.
“Cy Vance is fighting way too hard to drop this case,” Tacopina said. “It looks like he’s tackling something.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling came in a single line on Monday: ‘The application for suspension submitted to Judge Breyer and referred to the court is denied.’
The one-line order was a clear contrast in the form of the last time the Supreme Court considered the dispute between Vance and Trump while the latter was still president.
In July, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 against Trump in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Trump argued at the time that he, as president, was immune to constitutional investigations.
According to the opinion, Roberts wrote that such immunity does not exist.
“In our legal system, ‘the public has the right to testify of everyone’. “Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States,” he wrote at the time.
But the court said Trump could still bring challenges in other directions against enforcing the summons, which he did.
In October, the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals again rejected Trump’s arguments. Later that month, Trump’s lawyers again asked the Supreme Court to step in.
The court’s silence over the October petition, as the election between Trump and soon-to-be President Joe Biden heated up, was taken by some to indicate that the judges did not want to get involved in the political drama between the two men.
This is news. Please come and check for updates.