By: Benjamin Bian
Cyrus R. Vance Jr, the leading district attorney in New York County, demanded that Mr.Trump hand over his tax returns. The demand came in a court filing investigating Mr Trump and his company over insurance fraud.
The demand came in a new federal court filing forcing Mr.Trump’s attorneys to obey a subpoena. A subpoena is a calling to court, and this particular one forces Mr.Trump’s attorneys to reveal eight years of personal and corporate tax returns. Trump has asked a judge if he could declare the request invalid.
Before, the investigation was more concerned with Mr.Trump’s bribes to women who claimed they had affairs with Mr.Trump. However, in the new filing, the prosecutors left a wide berth on their case against Mr.Trump. This allowed them to have a wide variety of reasons for their subpoena.
Among their reasons that prove Trump’s wrongdoings, they claim that Trump may have illegally inflated his net worth, and also include an article on the testimony of Micheal Cohen, a former Trump lawyer who told lawmakers that Trump committed fraud.
When Mr.Trump was asked about the ongoing investigation during a briefing at the White House, Mr.Trump declared it a “continuation of the worst witch hunt in American history.” For almost a year, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance have been locked in combat over the subpoena until it eventually reached the supreme court.
Mr.Vance is a democrat, and he subpoenaed Mr.Trump and his accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August 2019. However, Trump immediately blocked this request, stating how as the current president, he was immune from state criminal investigation.
The case wormed its way through federal courts until it eventually reached the supreme court, with Mr.Vance’s office claiming that Mr.Trump stalled the legal case to protect himself from further investigation.
“What the president’s lawyers are seeking here is delay,” claimed one of Mr.Vance’s lawyers. The lawyer, Carey R. Dunne also proclaimed how the longer the case dragged on, the sooner the statute of limitations would expire and the president would have an impenetrable shield against any other criminal accusations.
Jay Sekulow, one of Mr.Trump’s lawyers, rebutted Dunnes’s claim.“Our strategy seeks due process,” claims Sekulow.
Even if Mr.Vance succeeds in his campaign to receive the President’s records, it will be a matter of time before they are released to the public. This is due to the grand jury secrecy rules. Trump’s records may only appear if criminal charges are held, and the records serve as evidence for the charges. It may seem Mr.Trump is just fighting a legal battle against an opposing party. But in the broader political spectrum, Mr. Trump is under attack by the opposing political party, the Democrats, for his style of leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic.