Democrats Want Trump’s ‘Every Debit Card Swipe,’ President’s Lawyer Argues
Democrats Want Trump’s ‘Every Debit Card Swipe,’ President’s Lawyer Argues
(Bloomberg) -- House Democrats want “every debit card swipe” in an overly broad pursuit of Donald Trump’s financial records meant to harass the president rather than fulfill their oversight duties, a lawyer for Trump told a federal appeals panel.
Trump’s lawyers were in court Friday trying to block Democrats’ access to records from Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp. -- a battle in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has much at stake, amid mounting pressure for impeachment proceedings, as she tries to persuade her caucus to let the litigation play out for now.
The hearing featured aggressive questioning of both sides by the three-judge panel in Manhattan, which gave both lawyers more than double the amount of time they had been allotted.
More striking was a standoff, toward the end, between the judges and the lawyers for the banks, who repeatedly refused to answer when asked if the banks had tax returns sought by the subpoenas.
“I’m simply not able to answer that question standing here today,” said Raphael Prober, an attorney for Deutsche Bank, citing statutes and contractual obligations to clients. Prober held his ground ever after Judge Jon Newman assured him, “I am not asking you for the content of them at all.”
It wasn’t clear whether Newman was hinting at the possibility of excluding tax information from any material that might be turned over -- or whether, by having shared the returns with the banks in the first place, the president may have effectively waived any right to keep them private.
In any case, the stonewalling didn’t sit well with the judges.
“We need to know,” Newman told Prober. “If you do have them, we need to worry about them.”
The panel ordered the lawyers to write letters under seal within 48 hours addressing the issue.
But first came Patrick Strawbridge, representing Trump.
“These subpoenas are targeting the president because he is the president,” Strawbridge told the court, urging it to block the banks from complying with the document demands because they have no legislative purpose.
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He scoffed at statements from the chairs of the House committees that issued the subpoenas, who cited the need to investigate the president’s ties to Russia and whether the Kremlin has leverage over him.
“There’s something else completely going on here,” Strawbridge said, arguing that subpoenas that targeted either a smaller set of documents or a larger group of people might be valid.
Instead, he told the court, they seek an unreasonably wide swath of documents, “every debit card swipe, every check that was written.”
Next came Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House of Representatives, who argued that the subpoenas aren’t overly broad, don’t intrude on the president’s time and were issued in connection with an industrywide investigation of potential money laundering by Russian oligarchs.
“We have a situation where Trump is going to Deutsche Bank asking for very large loans when nobody else would touch him,” Letter told the judges. “Why were these banks willing to lend under these circumstances, and should there be more legislation, should there be more regulation, to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”
He said the probe includes subpoenas sent to “a whole bunch of banks” that have nothing to do with Trump or his relatives.
--With assistance from Billy House.
To contact the reporters on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net;Gerald Porter Jr. in New York at gporter30@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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