Appelante Court ruling 2-1 today that Congress can subpoena President Trump’s tax returns.
Trump has the option of an appeal to the Supreme Court, but given that the lower courts have all ruled against him and given there is no obvious Constitutional issue at hand (given the Nixon case precedent) why would the Court agree to take the case, As a general rule, the Supreme Court only takes cases where there has been disagreement between levels of the lower courts.
Does anyone see an avenue for the Supreme Court to take the case… or are we proceeding the Trump’s choice to obey a court-supported subpoena or to defy it.
There was no stay pending appeal, so Judge Mehta’s original order remains in effect from May. So, yes, the deadline to produce is long past. Trump will have to either get a further agreement to delay production, or a stay of the Order. Just filing for en banc reconsideration or a Writ of Certiorari with SCOTUS will not delay production.
I somewhat hope not. I think that making the documents public will be fodder for Trump to claim bad faith. Recall that the rulings repeatedly refer to a legislative subpoena not being for the purpose of publicizing the results.
I agree with the posters who have suggested that Cummings will not rush the documents into public view – the optics of that would make his Committee appear to have been disingenuous in their work.
However, given what happened with the Whistleblower and the release of the Zelinsky call transcript, I expect the Trump team will release the tax returns as soon as they go to the Committee. That way they can claim to have acted in the public interest and they can spin whatever the returns contain, much as they are spinning the notion that there was nothing inappropriate in the Zelinsky call.
They will release a memo describing the tax returns and claim that there is nothing fishy in them even though the memo shows a clear impeachable offense.