President Trump filed a new complaint on Monday, seeking to further delay a criminal subpoena for his long-withheld financial information.
The Supreme Court remanded the case, in which President Trump hired personal attorneys to block a state-level subpoena for records held by his longtime accountant, back to the Southern District of New York three weeks ago. It did so with the proviso that Trump embark on new avenues of argument, other than that the simple fact of his holding the office of President negates any potential involvement in a state-level criminal probe.
The high court denied earlier arguments from Trump that his status as President made him immune from any kind of criminal procedure.
In his supposedly new arguments, Trump called the subpoena “wildly overbroad,” saying that it “is not a properly tailored subpoena for the President’s records.”
He also accused Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who got the subpoena from a grand jury, of acting “in bad faith” and trying to engage in “harassment of the President.”
Trump went on to claim that Vance is limited on a number of grounds, all of which allegedly invalidate the subpoena.
The Manhattan DA’s jurisdiction is limited to “New York County,” and the DA is barred by a statute of limitations that keeps “most New York crimes” unprosecutable “from one to five years after the commission of the offense.”
But the President’s business, his attorneys argued, spans the globe — with documents “in Canada, the Dominican Republic, Dubai, India, Indonesia, Ireland, the Philippines, Scotland, and Turkey.”
Trump went on to argue that the subpoena was both invasively broad and invasively detailed, asking for “an accounting and analysis of every single asset and liability of the President, including each one of the listed entities.”
“That is hundreds — if not thousands — of comprehensive reports, each one containing a trove of information about the health, trajectory, and operations of the business,” his attorneys wrote.
Trump’s attorneys — led by William Consovoy and Marc Mukasey— make much hay out of similarities between the New York state subpoena and a separate subpoena issued by the House Oversight Committee to Mazars.
“The original author of the subpoena (aside from the request for tax returns) — the House Oversight Committee — had no intention of it being used to facilitate a state-law criminal investigation,” Trump argued.
From there, the complaint goes on to address the separate House demand for Trump’s financial records, held by Mazars, falling just short of accusing the Manhattan District Attorney of conspiring with Congress.
“It is inconceivable to think that a subpoena designed for the purpose of achieving the Committee’s explicitly national and international goals and structured around a particular action by the federal government that took place in Washington D.C. is properly tailored to the New York grand jury’s state-law investigation,” Trump wrote.
Last week, Vance’s office said in court that it considered Trump like any other CEO whose records were subject to a subpoena. In the amended complaint, Trump asks for the subpoena to be quashed.
Consovoy, the Trump attorney, argued in an earlier iteration of the case that his client would be immune from criminal investigation were he to have shot a person on Fifth Avenue. The Supreme Court rejected that absurd argument. But legal experts told TPM after the ruling that they way in which the court did so would still likely allow the case to proceed beyond the November election.
Read the amended complaint here:
Here’s a question from over 3 years ago that needs answering: What’s he hiding? As if we can’t guess. He has fought against financial disclosure more forcefully than he has addressed Russian interference, systemic racism, Russian bounties on American troops, and the Covid 19 virus’ effect on millions of people.
Cut to the chase, and just have Barr send Border Patrol troops to Manhattan to arrest Vance for something.
Lame argument.
The POTUS is so toxic he can’t pay respects to John Lewis today and his lawyers file a complaint to delay justice for his financial crimes.
There’s good news and bad news. The bad news: The legal system favors corrupt, litigious billionaires, not to mention presidents happy to abuse power. Trump has spent a whole career fighting in the courts, and there is no particular reason to believe that he won’t avoid a definitive judgment against him for 3-4 years, particularly with a Supreme Court that is mostly in his pocket.
The good news (assuming Trump loses in November): Trump’s ongoing impunity, and his inevitable ongoing prominence during a Biden administration, will only serve to keep the Dem base stoked and angry. That will enable Ds to do better in the midterms and will dispel the dangerous illusion (currently being fostered by senior Democratic officials) that the USA is basically fine, that what we’re seeing is an aberration, and the GOP is beneath it all a fine party.
In other words, it’s a win-win.
Related: I’m a big fan of Trump owning his own TV station in due course. It will be painful and harmful, but not as painful and harmful as the GOP winning the 2022 midterms because the Dem base has been lulled into a false sense of security (as in 2010).
An eight year old with a slingshot could illustrate the trajectory of the President’s business holdings easily enough.