Supreme Court rejects Trump’s final bid to shield tax returns from Manhattan

Vance responded to the court decision with a three-word tweet: “The work continues.”

The current fight is a follow-up to last summer’s decision by the high court that the president is not immune from a criminal investigation while he holds office.

“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in that 7 to 2 decision.

But the justices said Trump could challenge the specific subpoena, as every citizen may, for being overbroad or issued in bad faith.

A district judge and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York found neither was the case.

Trump’s complaints “amount to generic objections that the subpoena is wide-ranging in nature,” the unanimous 2nd Circuit panel wrote. “Again, even if the subpoena is broad, the complaint does not adequately allege that it is overbroad. Complex financial and corporate investigations are broad by default.”

Similarly, the panel said, “we hold that none of the president’s allegations, taken together or separately, are sufficient to raise a plausible inference that the subpoena was issued out of malice or an intent to harass.”

Vance is seeking eight years of the former president’s tax returns and related documents as part of his investigation into alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years before. Trump denies the claims.

Investigators want to determine whether efforts were made to conceal the payments on tax documents by labeling them as legal expenses.

But Vance says there are other aspects of the investigation that have not been publicly disclosed. Court filings by the prosecutors suggest the investigation is looking into other allegations of impropriety, perhaps involving tax and insurance fraud.

Trump’s lawyers told the Supreme Court both of the lower court decisions were faulty. The subpoena was not narrowly tailored, but instead based on one issued by congressional committees. It would cross the line even if it was “aimed at ‘some other citizen’ instead of the president,” wrote Trump’s lawyers William S. Consovoy and Jay Alan Sekulow.

“The court of appeals not only ignored how the district court stacked the deck against the president,” the petition continues. “But it also broke every rule and precedent applicable” to the legal procedure at issue, it said.

Consovoy said it should be easy for the court to at least temporarily put the lower court rulings on hold and hear his case, which in the court’s language is called granting certiorari.

“The President of the United States requests the opportunity to seek certiorari before his confidential financial records are disclosed to the grand jury and potentially the public,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “Once the records are produced, the status quo can never be restored.”

The appeals court…