After losing an appeal to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Wednesday, President Trump’s lead attorney, Jay Sekulow, said he will send the case to the Supreme Court. That should effectively end Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr.’s attempt to damage the president before the election.
Vance, a Democrat and the son of Cyrus Vance, Sr., who served as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, has long had it in for the president. In March 2019, he filed 16 indictments charging mortgage fraud against Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Trump’s presidential election campaign. All 16 were dismissed by a judge.
Following the debacle over Manafort, Vance focused on the president himself, filing a demand to look at eight years of Trump’s tax returns. He said it was because of suspicions that the president paid hush money to two women during his 2016 campaign. Later on he expanded the reasons, claiming that there was “mountainous” evidence that the president had committed tax fraud while operating his business in years past.
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Vance suggested that the president, in applying for bank loans, greatly inflated the values of properties he was using for collateral. Vance’s attorneys said that “taken together, [such allegations] fully justify the scope of the grand jury subpoena.” Vance expanded by saying his probe also would cover reports of “possibly extensive and protracted insurance and bank fraud by [his] company and its officers.”
Following the rejection by a court of one of his appeals in August, Trump called it out for what it is: “This is a continuation of the witch hunt, the greatest witch hunt in history. There’s never been anything like it, where people want to examine everything you’ve ever done to see if they can find that there’s a comma out of place. No president has ever had to go through this.”
Then again, no president has threatened the establishment and the exposure of the Deep State’s influence in the federal government like Trump. The three judges who ruled against him were all appointed by Democrat presidents.
One definition of a witch hunt is “an investigation carried out ostensibly to uncover subversive activities but actually used to harass and undermine those with differing views.”
The witch hunt began in earnest in August 2019, when Vance opened an investigation into hush-money payments Trump allegedly made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. Vance subpoenaed tax records from Trump’s accounting firm and his primary bank, Deutsche Bank.
Trump claimed presidential “immunity,” and when that defense came to naught he appealed. In November 2019 a three-judge panel for the Second Circuit Court — all appointed by Democrat presidents — ruled in favor of Vance. That case went to the Supreme Court in July with the high court ruling that Trump didn’t have that immunity but said he could try again using other defenses.
Trump’s lawyers then tried to prove that Vance’s demands were nothing more than a fishing expedition, looking for a crime to hang around the president’s neck. They claimed that Vance’s subpoena was a form of “harassment,” that it was “widely overbroad” and issued in “bad faith.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard the president’s arguments, and dismissed them.
Trump’s second appeal to the Supreme Court likely ends Vance’s efforts to damage the president before Election Day. As Jonathan Stempel noted in Reuters on Wednesday:
Even if Vance gets Trump’s tax returns, grand jury secrecy rules make it unlikely he will reveal their contents unless criminal charges were brought.
If that happened, it would likely occur after the November 3 election.
