Manhattan District Attorney Vance urges judge to toss Trump challenge to tax records subpoena
- Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. urged a federal judge to dismiss President Donald Trump's latest effort to prevent prosecutors from getting the president's tax returns and other records from his accountants through a grand jury subpoena.
- The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this summer rejected Trump's bid to block on the subpoena, ruling that presidents do not have immunity from being investigated for crimes by state prosecutors while in office.
- Vance is seeking the financial records from the accounting firm Mazars USA as part of a reported probe into how the president's company, the Trump Organization, accounted for a hush money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump years ago.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. urged a federal judge Monday to dismiss President Donald Trump's latest legal effort to prevent prosecutors from getting the president's tax returns and other records from his accountants through a grand jury subpoena.
Vance's office in a new court filing said that Trump's second lawsuit trying to block that subpoena "merely regurgitates allegations and arguments this Court has rejected before."
Trump's " 'new' filing contains nothing new whatsoever, and [Trump] has utterly failed to make a 'stronger showing' of bad faith than he previously made to this Court," Vance's office said in its own response to the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court.
Vance's office also argued that Trump's suit opposing the subpoena "merely serves to delay the grand jury's investigation."
The office said: "Every day that goes by is another day Plaintiff effectively achieves the 'temporary absolute immunity' that was rejected by this Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court."
And the DA also argued that further delay increases the chance of loss of evidence and expiring of the statute of limitations for certain crimes.
The U.S. Supreme Court last month rejected Trump's bid to block on the subpoena, ruling that presidents do not have immunity from being investigated for crimes by state prosecutors while in office.
But the Supreme Court allowed Trump to raise other arguments opposing the subpoena at the federal district court level, which the president's lawyers did last month.
Vance is seeking the financial records from the accounting firm Mazars USA as part of a reported probe into how the president's company, the Trump Organization, accounted for a hush money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump years ago.
Trump has denied having sex with Daniels.
Vance's office is also seeking the records to see if they contain evidence of other "potentially improper financial transactions by a variety of individuals and entities over a period of years," the filing on Monday reveals.
"At the time the Mazars Subpoena was issued, there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff's New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade," Vance's office wrote the filing.
"These reports describe transactions involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York's borders."
Trump has refused to release his income tax returns to the public, reversing more than four decades of practice by other presidents.
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