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Utopia Talk / Politics / Supreme Court stabs Trump in the back
Average Ameriacn
Member
Mon Feb 22 12:01:28
Taritors!

When Trump wins in 2024 he will replace all of them!!!! ALL OF THEM!!!!


http://www...p-taxes-financial-records.html


Supreme Court Denies Trump’s Bid to Conceal Taxes, Financial Records


The former president’s accountants will give the records he has spent years trying to shield to New York prosecutors




WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-ditch attempt by former President Donald J. Trump to shield his financial records, issuing a brief, unsigned order requiring Mr. Trump’s accountants to turn over his tax and other records to prosecutors in New York.

The court’s order was a decisive defeat for Mr. Trump, who had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his tax returns and related documents secret. There were no dissents noted.

The case concerned a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accountants, Mazars USA, by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat. The firm has said it will comply with the final ruling of the courts, meaning that the grand jury should receive the documents in short order.

Mr. Vance issued a three-word statement in response to the court’s order: “The work continues.”

Under grand jury secrecy rules, it would ordinarily be unclear when, if ever, the public would see the information. But The New York Times has obtained more than two decades of tax return data of Mr. Trump and his companies, and it recently published a series of articles about them.

Mr. Trump, the articles said, has sustained significant losses, owes enormous debts that he is personally obligated to repay, has avoided paying federal income taxes in 11 of the 18 years The Times examined and paid just $750 in both 2016 and 2017.

The scope of Mr. Vance’s inquiry is not known. It arose partly from an investigation by his office into hush-money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump, relationships the president has denied. But court filings by prosecutors suggested that they are also investigating potential crimes like tax and insurance fraud.

The subpoena sought Mr. Trump’s tax records and financial statements since 2011, the engagement agreements with the accountants who prepared them, the underlying raw financial data and information about how the data were analyzed.

As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump promised to disclose his tax returns, but he never did. Instead, he fought hard to shield the returns from scrutiny, for reasons that have been the subject of much speculation. In 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that state prosecutors may require third parties to turn over a sitting president’s financial records for use in a grand jury investigation.

In a footnote to the decision, Judge Robert A. Katzmann said that Mr. Trump’s break with his predecessors’ practice was significant.

“We note that the past six presidents, dating back to President Carter, all voluntarily released their tax returns to the public,” Judge Katzmann wrote. “While we do not place dispositive weight on this fact, it reinforces our conclusion that the disclosure of personal financial information, standing alone, is unlikely to impair the president in performing the duties of his office.”

Mr. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court. In July, the justices soundly rejected Mr. Trump’s central constitutional argument against the subpoena — that state prosecutors are powerless to investigate a sitting president.

“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 decision.

Though Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented from other aspects of the decision, all nine justices agreed with that proposition. But the court gave Mr. Trump another opportunity to challenge the subpoena, on narrower grounds.

“A president may avail himself of the same protections available to every other citizen,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “These include the right to challenge the subpoena on any grounds permitted by state law, which usually include bad faith and undue burden or breadth.”

Mr. Trump did just that, but his arguments were rejected by a trial judge and a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York.

“Any documents produced under the Mazars subpoena would be protected from public disclosure by grand jury secrecy rules,” the panel said in an unsigned opinion, “which greatly reduces the plausibility of the allegation that the district attorney is acting out of a desire to embarrass the president.”

“There is nothing to suggest,” the panel added of the information sought, “that these are anything but run-of-the-mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers then filed an “emergency application” asking the Supreme Court to intercede. It urged the court to block the appeals court’s ruling while it decided whether to hear another appeal from Mr. Trump.

“Even if the disclosure of his papers is limited to prosecutors and grand jurors, the status quo can never be restored once confidentiality is destroyed,” the brief said. “But the harm will be more than irreparable if the records are publicly disclosed. It will be case-mooting — the strongest possible basis for a stay.”

In response, Mr. Vance’s lawyers — including Carey R. Dunne, who argued the case the first time around; Walter E. Dellinger III, a former acting United States solicitor general in the Clinton administration; and Michael R. Dreeben, a former longtime deputy solicitor general and a member of the team that assisted Robert S. Mueller III in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election — pointed to the Times articles. The cat, they said, was out of the bag.

“The New York Times has obtained his tax-return data and described that data in depth in a series of articles,” Mr. Vance’s brief said. “With the details of his tax returns now public, applicant’s asserted confidentiality interests have become highly attenuated if they survive at all. And even assuming any remain, they cannot justify extraordinary relief from this court that would deprive the grand jury alone of facts available to anyone who reads the press.”

“This litigation has already substantially hampered the grand jury’s investigation,” the brief said. “No legal basis exists for the extraordinary relief that applicant requests — or remotely justifies the further delay it entails.”
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 12:08:23
the wheels of justice slowly cranking forward

seems everyone around Trump whose tax records get examined are criminals, & Trump oozes criminality, so here's hoping the whole family of obvious conmen goes down
Habebe
Member
Mon Feb 22 12:17:36
On what grounds was he trying to keep them concealed? That seems to be the important factor.


“We note that the past six presidents, dating back to President Carter, all voluntarily released their tax returns to the public,” Judge Katzmann wrote. “

In all fairness he has also been the most persecuted President of all time.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 12:27:50
^that ruling was in reference to Trump using a 'presidents are above the law!' bullshit claim that had to be rejected all the way up to the Supreme Court initially

Trump's scum lawyers then went with new arguments (seems on 'bad faith') that appear to also have been rejected all the way up


in article, after his 'i'm above the law' shit failed:
"
“A president may avail himself of the same protections available to every other citizen,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “These include the right to challenge the subpoena on any grounds permitted by state law, which usually include bad faith and undue burden or breadth.”

Mr. Trump did just that, but his arguments were rejected by a trial judge and a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York.
"


hopefully this is the end of it & he can't just run more bullshit arguments up the time-consuming chain
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 13:37:47
Trump's rambling response:

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eu2pUVZWgAUnloh?format=png

TLDR: 'witch hunt, hoax, Russia, no collusion, crazy Nancy, bragging, i'm a victim, everyone else is corrupt, is being done to stop his 75 million voters (??), i won election'

ie, his standard shit
Dukhat
Member
Mon Feb 22 13:39:35
Trump said multiple times he’d show his tax returns. Why is he so afraid to do something Hillary did?

At any rate, they’ll just show what most Americans know. He’s a conman.

Whatever. The GoP got their dirty supreme court seats.
habebe
Member
Mon Feb 22 16:37:06
TW, Is that an official response?
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 17:57:02
yes it's his official response, does it not sound like his usual responses to you? if so, you don't know the 'man'


& here's his cokehead son's response:

"
So the Supreme Court will allow the political persecution for Donald Trump by vindictive partisan democrats to continue.
If they can keep a witch hunt against Trump going for years who cant they and more importantly who won't they do it to???
"

it's not like Trump's personal attorney & goon for years accused him of financial crimes under penalty of perjury or anything, plus the heaps of reporting of questionable behavior... but yeah, no reason to investigate...
kargen
Member
Mon Feb 22 18:16:15
Wait a minute here. Didn't tumbleweed and others spend a couple of months telling us these appointees were just shills to do Trump's bidding?

Turns out that isn't the case.

So maybe just maybe a lot of the other stuff he did was also good and President Biden is really fucking up by overturning what former-president Trump had in place.

Well not maybe. President Biden is fucking up.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 18:26:39
"Didn't tumbleweed and others spend a couple of months telling us these appointees were just shills to do Trump's bidding? "

um no? i literally never said that even once
kargen
Member
Mon Feb 22 22:39:26
okay, maybe you didn't use the word shill. Not your style. Your language was much more vile.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 22:57:02
my consistent position has been Trump had nothing to do with any of them, so i said nothing close

he was provided a very short list of clones & he picked from it
habebe
Member
Mon Feb 22 22:59:36
^Presumably from McConnel?

Actually I do vaguley recall TW mentioning something about Trump having almost nothing to do with the process.

He still.was not fans of the appointments though.
tumbleweed
the wanderer
Mon Feb 22 22:59:59
...however for corrupt AG Bill Barr, it was 100% done to protect himself... he even said out loud how he viewed protecting himself as the sole role of the AG
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