Manhattan D.A. Urges Court to Reject Trump Subpoena Appeal

(Bloomberg) -- The Manhattan District Attorney urged a federal appeals court to deny President Donald Trump’s legal bid to prevent his accounting firm from turning over his financial records to a grand jury investigating hush-money payments to two women who claimed they had sex with him.

A federal judge in New York ruled last week that Trump can’t stop his accountants, Mazars USA LLP, from providing eight years of taxes and other financial documents to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., whose office is investigating whether the Trump Organization falsified business records to disguise the payments. Trump appealed, and the court set up an expedited schedule to hear the case, with oral arguments set for Oct. 23.

In a brief filed Tuesday, Vance argued that Trump is making a “remarkable proposition” to the court, “not only that a sitting president enjoys blanket immunity from criminal prosecution,” but that the immunity protects him from subpoenas targeting actions taken before he took office and that it extends to his companies, former associates and employees.

“This extravagant claim is unsupported by constitutional text, statute, or caselaw,” Vance’s team argued in the brief.

The lower-court judge, Victor Marrero, called Trump’s claim of absolute immunity “repugnant” to the structure of the U.S. government and to the country’s constitutional values. Marrero said that because the case concerns a state grand jury subpoena, it should be decided by a state court. He also said Trump was unlikely to win on his constitutional arguments.

On Friday, a federal appeals court in Washington upheld a different subpoena ordering Mazars to give Trump’s financial records to Congress. In a 2-1 decision, the court rejected arguments that the House Oversight and Reform Committee had no legitimate legislative reason to seek the information.

The case is Trump v. Vance, 19-3204, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Manhattan).

To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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