Now We Get To See Trump Try To Dodge A Grand Jury Subpoena

Cy Vance wants eight years of Trump financials from Mazars.

Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance (Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

Manhattan District Attorney, and professional look-the-other-way-er, Cyrus Vance has revealed grand jury subpoenas for eight years of Donald Trump and Trump.org financial documents from Trump’s accountant, Mazars USA. Vance is looking into illegal hush money payments allegedly made by Trump to silence two of his lovers, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Vance wants to know if Trump falsified business records to hide the payments. Falsifying business records is a crime in New York. Falsifying business records to cover up a crime is a felony.

These subpoenas amount to Cy Vance doing his best Matt Damon impression and asking Donald Trump, “Do you like apples?” Trump can play footsie with Congress as much as he likes, and hope that his handpicked judges on the U.S. Supreme Court will bail him out.

Mazars, on the other hand, is going to have much more difficulty doing business in New York while the City and State of New York are hounding it to comply with a grand jury subpoena. Remember, at the federal level, it’s Trump’s Department of Justice that is in charge of enforcing subpoenas. Obviously, Attorney General William Barr views himself as Trump’s lawyer, not America’s. In New York State, things are different. Armed with this subpoena, there are various state law enforcement agencies willing to back it up, including everything that flows through New York Attorney General Tish James and Governor Andrew Cuomo.

There aren’t a lot of outs for Mazars here. Trump might want them to destroy their entire business on his behalf, but that’s not a call the firm is likely to make. From the New York Times:

Asked whether the company would seek to quash the subpoena, Mazars USA said in a statement that it “will respect the legal process and fully comply with its legal obligations,” adding that the company was prohibited by its policy and professional rules from commenting on its work. The statement, however, did not directly address whether the company might take any legal action to block the subpoena.

I don’t expect Mazars to just roll, but I also don’t expect it to adopt Trump’s unprecedented policy of ignoring subpoenas like they don’t even exist.

Sponsored

The most legally exposed president since Richard Nixon is still very much exposed, folks. And I do not expect the investigations to end after the 2020 election.

8 Years of Trump Tax Returns Are Subpoenaed by Manhattan D.A. [New York Times]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Sponsored