Supreme Court divided over fight for Trump's financial records

[mystery-ak]

Supreme Court divided over fight for Trump's financial records 
By John Kruzel - 05/12/20 02:53 PM EDT

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared divided over President Trump’s assertion that the broad powers he enjoys as the nation’s chief executive override subpoenas for his financial records and tax returns.

Trump’s standoff with a trio of Democratic-led House committees and Manhattan prosecutors over his financial paper trail saw the justices raise divergent concerns about presidential immunity, congressional oversight and the power of prosecutors to gather evidence linked to a sitting president.

The first argument in Tuesday’s pair of overlapping cases concerned a slate of congressional subpoenas issued to Trump’s accountants and banks.


The court’s more conservative justices tended to focus on the risk of granting Congress overly broad powers, including the potential for presidential harassment, while the reliably liberal justices aired concerns about placing overly restrictive limits on lawmakers.

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https://thehill.com/regulation/497385-supreme-court-divided-over-fight-for-trumps-financial-records

[Elderberry]

Argument analysis: A marathon debate, and no clear winners, in debate over Trump tax returns

SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 5/12/2020

https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/05/argument-analysis-a-marathon-debate-and-no-clear-winners-in-debate-over-trump-tax-returns/

The battle over efforts to obtain President Donald Trump’s tax returns reached the Supreme Court in two oral arguments today. Over a year ago, committees in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and a Manhattan district attorney issued subpoenas for the president’s financial records to the president’s longtime accountant and lenders, but the president has tried to block those institutions from complying with the subpoenas. After nearly three-and-a-half hours of oral arguments today, it appeared that the results could be mixed for Trump. A majority of the justices appeared skeptical of claims, made by a lawyer for the House of Representatives, that the committees have broad power to request the president’s personal papers, but they seemed equally dubious in the second argument that the president has the categorical immunity from state grand-jury proceedings that he is claiming.

First up today was the dispute between the president and the House of Representatives, where three committees issued subpoenas for the president’s financial records in April of last year. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform said it wanted documents from Mazars, the president’s longtime accountant, as part of an investigation into the adequacy of government ethics laws, while the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence issued subpoenas for documents from Deutsche Bank and Capital One, two of the president’s biggest lenders, as part of an investigation into possible foreign influence in U.S. elections.

Arguing for the president, lawyer Patrick Strawbridge described the committees’ subpoenas as “unprecedented in every sense.” No court, he argued, had ever upheld Congress’ use of its subpoena power to obtain the personal papers of a sitting president. The committees’ “obvious overreach” would be enough to invalidate the subpoenas “even in a typical case,” Strawbridge told the justices, but this is not a typical case. “The committees have not even tried to show any critical legislative need for the documents these subpoenas seek.”

Chief Justice John Roberts kicked off the questioning by asking Strawbridge to clarify his argument: Does Trump contend that that the House of Representatives can never subpoena the president’s personal papers, or does he agree that it might have the power to do so in at least some cases?

Strawbridge conceded that the House at least theoretically has the power to subpoena the president’s personal papers, although such a subpoena would have to meet a high standard. That response prompted Roberts to suggest that the case boils down to one in which “the courts are balancing the competing interests on either side.” The justices then spent much of the next hour and a half trying to figure out how to balance those interests and what the limits on Congress’ subpoena power might be.

Strawbridge reiterated that Congress could exercise its power to obtain the president’s personal documents only in very limited situations. Answering a question from Justice Clarence Thomas, he stressed that although Congress can seek information relevant to legislation that it might be considering, such information should normally be “forward-looking” or “aggregated information,” rather an effort to “reassemble a precise factual history.”

More at link.