NEW YORK (Reuters) – Manhattan’s top prosecutor told a U.S. appeals court on Thursday he should be able to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns, saying the U.S. president should not be allowed to effectively immunize himself from a criminal probe by pursuing an appeal that “stands no chance of success.”
Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, made the argument in a filing with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
That court will on Sept. 1 consider Trump’s emergency motion to suspend a lower court ruling letting Vance enforce a subpoena for eight years of tax returns from the president’s accounting firm Mazars USA.
Trump has been fighting to block the subpoena altogether for a year, including at the U.S. Supreme Court, which last month rejected his argument that he was immune from criminal probes while in the White House.
The president has said Vance’s subpoena was “the ultimate fishing expedition” and part of a “witch hunt,” and the case will likely head back to the Supreme Court.
But Vance said that by continuing to litigate, Trump had effectively obtained “temporary absolute immunity,” a claim “rejected at every level of the federal courts,” by delaying a grand jury from seeing his tax returns.
Trump has until Aug. 31 to respond to Vance’s filing.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chris Reese and Grant McCool)
