It’s déjà vu for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, as President Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to stay a subpoena for the President’s tax returns.
President Trump is taking his second pass at the Supreme Court in his long-running legal battle to block a state investigation into his finances. The filing Tuesday repeated long-held arguments that a subpoena issued in August 2019 by a Manhattan state grand jury to his accounting firm Mazars USA LLP for years of his financial records is both overbroad an an example of “presidential harassment.”
The arguments aren’t new, but do depart from the line of thinking that landed the same case before the Supreme Court earlier this year. Then, Trump had argued that his position as President made him immune from state-level criminal processes. That led to an infamous interaction last year in which Trump attorney William Consovoy told the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that the NYPD, a state-level entity, could not investigate his client for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue while in office.
In the current round of filings, Trump cites overbreadth and bad intent as reasons for blocking the subpoena. But in oral arguments before the Second Circuit last month, Consovoy said that there was no circumstance in which President Trump would accept a grand jury subpoena, and that there was no tailoring or adjustment that could be done to make the legal demand acceptable.
Trump asked in Tuesday’s filing that the Supreme Court stay enforcement of the subpoena until he files for writ of certiorari. Absent that, Trump asked the court to “treat the stay application as a petition for a writ of certiorari, grant the petition, and summarily reverse the judgment below.”
Read the filing here:
