The Manhattan district attorney seems to have found his proverbial witch.
The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the enforcement of a grand jury subpoena for tax records belonging to former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly has called the process a political “witch hunt.”
The highest court in the land ruled it would not step between the combatants in the long legal fight between Trump and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance.
Vance first tried the subpoena route with Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA in 2019 while conducting a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization. That pursuit was initially targeted toward payments made by Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen during the 2016 election.
The ruling also muddles what Trump likely hopes would be the first step of a comeback. He has said he plans to deliver a speech to the conservative conference CPAC in the coming days.
The news wasn’t all bad for Trump, though, since the justices rejected a plea from Stormy Daniels, the subject of one of Trump’s alleged affairs. Daniels had sought to overturn a ruling that she could not sue Trump for defamation for Tweeting that she was a “con job.”
While this means Vance will be able to access information — for more than eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax records — the tax records are not likely to be made public.
Trump has said this attempt would not succeed because, since he was president, he had “absolute immunity” from criminal investigations.
This is the second time Trump sought Supreme Court protection to guard his finances – and the second time it will have failed.
Last summer, those “absolute immunity” claims were rejected by the Supreme Court, which returned the case to lower courts to resolve other issues.
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