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âȘ The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that President Trump is not immune from a subpoena over his financial and tax records to Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. — and declined in a separate case to issue a definitive ruling on whether congressional committees can have access to Trump’s financial records, throwing both issues back to lower courts.
Vance had subpoenaed Trump’s records as part of a criminal investigation into potential wrongdoing by the president and his organization. Multiple House committees had subpoenaed Trump’s records ostensibly as part of an effort at oversight and to inform potential legislation.
“President is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s majority opinion in the New York case. The court limited its ruling and the arguments before it to whether Trump has “absolute immunity” and state prosecutors are required to show a “heightened need” in order to obtain documents as part of investigations into a president.
The President “may raise further arguments as appropriate,” in lower courts in an effort to keep Vance from obtaining his documents, Roberts wrote. Roberts also authored the opinion in the House case.
“Without limits on its subpoena powers, Congress could ‘exert an imperious control’ over the Executive Branch and aggrandize itself at the Presidentâs expense, just as the Framers feared,” he wrote.
But Roberts and the majority in the House case also left open the possibility that the House, after further proceedings in lower courts, could get ahold of the President’s documents.
“When Congress seeks information ‘needed for intelligent legislative action,’ it ‘unquestionably’ remains ‘the duty of all citizens to cooperate,'” he wrote. But, he said, subpoenas from Congress to the president “implicate special concerns regarding the separation of powers. The courts below did not take adequate account of those concerns.”
The rulings, in the near term, represent a partial victory for the President — he will not have to turn over financial documents in the midst of a fraught presidential election. But neither ruling foreclosed the possibility that the president would eventually have to turn over his documents.
Vance, in the New York case, had argued in a brief that “[t]he subpoenas seek records, dating from 2011 to the present, concerning transactions that are unrelated to any official acts of the President, and that occurred largely before Petitioner assumed office.”
He also noted that among the potential criminal issues the president is under investigation for is alleged “hush money” given to women that he had affairs with, which may have equated to a campaign finance violation in which Trump was complicit.
Trump used personal lawyers rather than White House lawyers for both cases. Those lawyers made a sweeping argument in the criminal case about the level of immunity a president enjoys while in office.
A brief from Trump’s lawyers notes an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that the President cannot be indicted while in office, but goes even further to essentially argue that he cannot be subject to any form of criminal investigation.
“Under Article II, the Supremacy Clause, and the overall structure of our Constitution, the President of the United States cannot be ‘subject to the criminal process’Â while he is in office,” it reads.
Trump’s lawyers also argued that letting prosecutors — especially local prosecutors — to investigate and potentially bring criminal action against the president steps on Congress’ impeachment power;Â that allowing localities to subpoena the president would essentially give them the power to coerce the chief executive into instituting their favored policies;Â and that the threat of criminal prosecution attached to grand jury subpoenas could distract the President from his duties. âȘ
SOURCE:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-records-vance-subpoena
