A Manhattan prosecutor trying to get President Donald Trump´s tax returns told a judge Monday that he was justified in demanding them, citing public reports of ‘extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.’
Trump´s lawyers last month said the grand jury subpoena for the tax returns was issued in bad faith and amounted to harassment of the president.
Manhattan District Attorney District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is seeking eight years of the Republican president´s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation is related to payoffs made to women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
In a court filing Monday, though, attorneys for Vance said Trump’s arguments that the subpoena was too broad stemmed from ‘the false premise’ that the probe was limited to so-called ‘hush-money’ payments.
‘This Court is already aware that this assertion is fatally undermined by undisputed information in the public record,’ Vance´s lawyers wrote.
They said public reporting demonstrates that at the time the subpoena was issues ‘there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff´s New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade.’
‘These reports describe transactions involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York´s borders. This possible criminal activity occurred within the applicable statutes of limitations, particularly if the transactions involved a continuing pattern of conduct,’ the lawyers said.
‘In light of these public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization, there was nothing facially improper (or even particularly unusual) about the Mazars Subpoena, which issued in connection with a complex financial investigation, requesting eight years of records from an accounting firm,’ they wrote.
The office had earlier subpoenaed the Mazars accounting firm for the tax return information, in a case that resulted in a 7-2 Supreme Court decision.
Source: Daily Mail
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