Trump Loses Appeal In Tax Return Fight With Manhattan DA

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump lost another battle Monday in the war against the Manhattan district attorney over the potential release of his tax returns.

A panel of federal judges in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Trump's claim to "temporary absolute presidential immunity" as they denied his request to block his accounting firm, Mazars USA, from giving his tax filings to Manhattan prosecutors.

The ruling paves the way for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.'s office to enforce a subpoena for the tax returns as a grand jury investigates hush money paid to two women during Trump's 2016 campaign.

"There is no obvious reason why a state could not begin to investigate a President during his term and, with the information secured during that search, ultimately determine to prosecute him after he leaves office," the three-judge panel wrote in its 36-page decision.

Trump's attorneys had argued that sitting presidents are immune to any criminal prosecutions or even investigations while in office. One of his lawyers said in court that local authorities could not touch Trump if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.

While they did not weigh in on whether Trump can be prosecuted for a crime or forced to hand over documents to state authorities himself, the judges said any presidential immunity to criminal proceedings "does not extend to investigative steps like the grand jury subpoena at issue here."

The president's lawyers will likely appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Trump's chief attorney in the case, William S. Consovoy, did not immediately responded to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.

Manhattan prosecutors sent Mazars a subpoena for about eight years of tax filings for Trump, his eponymous company, the Trump Organization, and other related firms, court records show.

The request was apparently part of a local investigation of payments meant to keep two women quiet about their alleged affairs with Trump during his first presidential campaign. Michael Cohen, the president's longtime attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to those payments last year.

Trump sued to block prosecutors from enforcing the subpoena even though he was not the subject of it, arguing that presidents have broad immunity to criminal proceedings.

The appeals court knocked down that argument by citing United States v. Nixon, the 1974 Supreme Court case that forced then-President Richard Nixon to hand over tape recordings in response to a federal subpoena. The court ruled that Nixon's "executive privilege" did not permit him to frustrate a federal investigation by defying the subpoena.

"The President has not persuasively explained why, if executive privilege did not preclude enforcement of the subpoena issued in Nixon, the Mazars subpoena must be enjoined despite seeking no privileged information and bearing no relation to the President’s performance of his official functions," the judges wrote Monday.

Trump has refused to make his tax returns public in a break with longstanding tradition for presidential candidates. Democrats in Congress have ramped up their efforts to obtain them in recent months, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a law allowing New York officials to provide Trump's state tax returns to certain congressional committees.