The lawsuit brought by AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump may seem like a distant memory now. But the fallout from Daniels’ case, which dominated headlines for much of 2018, continues to plague Trump, who now says that he’ll take the latest Daniels-related case to the United States Supreme Court.
In September, as AVN.com reported, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced that his office was launching an investigation into the $130,000 “hush money” payment from Trump to Daniels in 2016.
As Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified, Trump made the payment to Daniels to buy her silence over a sexual encounter that, Daniels says, took place in 2006. Trump ordered Cohen to make the payment, according to Cohen’s testimony, later reimbursing the lawyer over a period of months.
Cohen is now serving a three-year term in federal prison in part over a campaign finance violation from the $130,000 payoff. Trump escaped prosecution as a co-conspirator due to a U.S. Justice Department policy, reflected nowhere in the law, against indicting a sitting president.
But Vance’s office, as a local law enforcement entity, is not bound by the Justice Department policy. Vance is now investigating the Daniels payoff, which originated in New York, as a state-level offense.
As a key element of the investigation, the DA has demanded that Trump’s accountants turn over the last eight years of his federal and state income tax returns.
In response, Trump’s lawyers argued in an appeals court that, well beyond the Justice Department non-indictment policy, a president enjoys “absolute immunity” from not only prosecution but even investigation for any crime whatsoever, as long as he holds office.
Trump’s lawyers, in fact, told the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, that Trump could literally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City in broad daylight, and he would not be subject to prosecution—or even arrest—as long as he occupies the presidency.
The Appeals Court on Monday flatly rejected the Trump lawyer’s far-fetched “immunity” claim, ruling that when it comes to Trump’s tax returns, nothing in the law or court precedent bars “a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce non‐privileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the President.”
Another lawyer who represents Trump, Jay Sekulow of the religious conservative American Center for Law and Justice, quickly said that Trump would continue to refuse to turn over his tax returns—and that he would take the case to the United States Supreme Court.
But legal commentator Harry Litman, a former former U.S. attorney, wrote in Monday’s Washington Post that because Trump’s “absolute immunity” argument is “absurd,” SCOTUS is likely to simply refuse to hear the case at all.
“The 2nd Circuit’s opinion is so narrow and straightforward, and the president’s legal arguments so preposterous, that the case doesn’t merit Supreme Court intervention,” Litman wrote. “It serves little purpose for the court to simply reaffirm the correctness of the 2nd Circuit’s reasoning. My prediction is that the court will let the case pass.”
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