U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday urged a federal appeals court to block what he called a bad-faith effort by Manhattan’s top prosecutor to enforce a “dragnet” subpoena for his tax returns to advance a criminal probe into his businesses, according to Reuters.
Trump has been resisting the attempt to enforce the subpoena for over a year now, which will force him to disclose his business and personal tax returns for eight years from his long time accounting firm, Mazars USA.
He said that the U.S District Judge Victor Marrero should look at his claims without seeing them as “back-door attempts” to claim absolute immunity from criminal probes while in the White House. A filing with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, Trump’s lawyers said a lower court judge erred in giving Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance a green light to obtain eight years of business and personal tax returns from the Mazars USA, according to media reports.
In a filing by Vance, it is stated that the subpoena “makes dragnet requests for reams of the President’s papers, requests documents as far back as 2011, and seeks records from entities all over the world.”
“Subpoenas issued to the President that are ‘arbitrary fishing expeditions’ or that are issued ‘out of malice or an intent to harass’ are invalid,” the filing also said.
Meanwhile, reports say that the filing on Friday is largely copied from an earlier subpoena from Congressional Democrats.
Trump, who is seeking reelection in November will not make the tax returns public before November 3, seeing the trajectory in which the case is moving with this appeal as the latest development.
However, Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 25.
