Judge rules against Trump in fight over tax returns; president appeals

NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York has rejected President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to prevent prosecutors from obtaining his tax returns.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is seeking the records as part of an investigation into the Manhattan-based Trump Organization and the president’s alleged involvement in hush-money payments to two women ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Trump’s attorneys, who argued that the request was overly broad and made in bad faith, quickly appealed the decision handed down Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero. Vance has argued that the subpoena, issued by a grand jury in August 2019, was legally valid and tied to an ongoing criminal investigation.

"The Court finds that the President has not sufficiently pled that the subpoena is overbroad or was issued in bad faith on this basis," Marrero wrote in a decision and order filed Thursday in court.

The decision echoed a previous one made in the case by Marrero and upheld last month by the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation's highest court sent the case back to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in a July 7 ruling, allowing Trump's attorneys a chance to raise other concerns about the subpoena.

Investigators are seeking Trump financial records dating back to 2011 from the president's longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, as part of an investigation into "properties and transactions involving or related to the (Manhattan-based) Trump Organization," according to prosecutors.

Trump’s lawyers have said that the request was retaliatory after the Trump Organization disputed the scope of a subpoena seeking records from June 1, 2015, through Sept. 20, 2018. That time span pertains to an investigation related to payoffs to two women — porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal — to keep them quiet during the 2016 presidential campaign about alleged extramarital affairs with Trump. The president has denied the affairs.

The appeal filed by the president’s attorneys Thursday means it is unlikely Vance’s office will get its hands on Trump’s tax returns before November’s presidential election. Because they are being sought as part of a confidential grand jury investigation, they would not automatically be made public.

Trump has frequently lambasted the request and others seeking his financial records as forms of presidential harassment. Congress is also seeking Trump's financial returns as part of a separate investigation.

On Thursday, the president told reporters that the subpoena in question "is the ultimate fishing expedition."

"But more importantly, this is a continuation of the witch hunt, the greatest with hunt in history," Trump said. "There's never been anything like it, where people want to examine everything you've ever done to see if they can find that there's a comma out of place. No president has ever had to go through this."

He added that he thinks the case will likely end up before the Supreme Court again and accused prosecutors of pursuing the subpoena for political means.

“Nobody has anything,” Trump said. “We don’t do things wrong. But they’ll say, ‘Let’s go in and inspect every deal he’s ever done. Let’s get papers from 10 years -- every paper, every deal he’s ever signed, maybe we can find where some lawyer made a mistake, where they didn’t dot an ‘i,’ where they didn’t put a comma down someplace, and then we can do something.’ This is a disgrace.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Cox Media Group