Trump v. Vance

Trump v. Vance, 591 U.S. 786 (2020), was a landmark

United States Supreme Court case arising from a subpoena issued in August 2019 by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. against Mazars , then-President Donald Trump 's accounting firm, for Trump's tax records and related documents, as part of his ongoing investigation into the Stormy Daniels scandal . Trump commenced legal proceedings to prevent their release.

The Court held that Article II and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution do not categorically preclude or require a heightened standard for the issuance of a state criminal subpoena to a sitting president. The 7–2 decision was issued in July 2020, with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting .

Contents

• 1 Background

  • 1.1 District Court

  • 1.2 Second Circuit

• 2 Supreme Court

  • 2.1 Majority opinion

  • 2.2 Concurring opinion

  • 2.3 Dissenting opinions

• 3 Post-judgment

  • 3.1 Remand to District Court

  • 3.2 Appeal to Federal Court

  • 3.3 Appeal to Supreme Court

• 4 Disclosure of records

• 5 See also

• 6 References

• 7 Further reading

• 8 External links

Background

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trump_v._Vance&action=edit&section=1 "Edit section: Background")

Main articles: Tax returns of Donald Trump ; Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP ; and List of lawsuits involving Donald Trump

After Donald Trump indicated his intent to run for U.S. president as a Republican candidate, he was called upon to release his income tax returns in the public interest, as most other presidential candidates did. Trump had stated in his campaign that he would release them once they had been "worked on." After his election victory and taking office in 2017, Trump refused to give over his tax records and stated that voters were not interested in them.

The Democratic Party gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, and by April 2019, the House Ways and Means Committee had formally requested from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) six years of Trump's returns, a power vested in Congress under 26 U.S.C.  § 6103 .

The IRS failed to comply with the request. Both the Ways and Means Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform filed subpoenas to Mazars , Trump's accounting firm, to obtain the tax information. The Trump administration refused to comply with the subpoenas and asserted that they lacked "a legitimate legislative purpose."

However, those subpoenas were directed at Mazars and later at Deutsche Bank and Capital One , where Trump had accounts, and those entities had indicated they would comply with the subpoenas. Trump then tried to block the subpoenas, which led to two separate suits, _Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP _ and Trump et al. v. Deutsche Bank AG, which were consolidated under the Trump v. Mazars suit by the Supreme Court in its 2019 term.

District Court

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trump_v._Vance&action=edit&section=2 "Edit section: District Court")

Separately, as part of the city's ongoing criminal investigation into the Stormy Daniels scandal , Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in August 2019 subpoenaed Mazars for Trump's tax returns.

Trump filed suit against the district attorney and Mazars in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to block the subpoena arguing that a sitting president enjoys "absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind."

Prosecutors countered that Trump had "sweeping immunity" from a criminal probe while he was in office and that Trump was "seeking to invent and enforce a new presidential 'tax return privilege,' on the theory that disclosing information in a tax return will necessarily reveal information that will somehow impede the functioning of a President, sufficiently to meet the test of irreparable harm."

The District Court dismissed the case on the basis of _Younger v. Harris _ (1971), which had stated federal courts should abstain in the matters of tort claims being brought by the person who was prosecuted by those claims. As such, the District Court ordered Trump to comply with the subpoena, pending a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit .

Second Circuit

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trump_v._Vance&action=edit&section=3 "Edit section: Second Circuit")

The Second Circuit panel ruled unanimously against Trump in November 2019. The decision stated that the president is not immune from "the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce non-privileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the President" and that a state grand jury may issue subpoenas "in aid of its investigation of potential crimes committed by persons within its jurisdiction, even if that investigation may in some way implicate the President."

Supreme Court

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trump_v._Vance&action=edit&section=4 "Edit section: Supreme Court")

Trump petitioned to the U.S. Supreme Court on the Second Circuit's ruling to the New York district attorney subpoena as well as in the separate cases related to the House Committee subpoenas. The Supreme Court agreed to take all three cases in December 2019, consolidating the two House Committee cases into Trump v. Mazars and handling the New York case under Trump v. Vance separately.

Oral arguments were held on May 12, 2020, alongside the Trump v. Mazars arguments, both as part of the set of cases held through teleconference because of the [COVID-19 pandemic](https://e

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