https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supreme-courts-rulings-on-trump-subpoenas-ho-hum/
A New York prosecutor may pursue the president’s financial information. Congress, though, must relitigate its case in lower courts.
The Supreme Court’s decisions Thursday on two separate cases involving subpoenas for the president’s personal financial information are legal defeats for the presidency. Politically, they are a win for Donald Trump.
Both opinions were authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and were ostensibly resounding 7–2 defeats for the president’s position. But there’s less here than meets the eye.
The State Grand Jury Subpoena One case involves a subpoena issued by a New York state grand jury conducting a criminal investigation led by the office of Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney. That investigation is believed to be focused, at least in part, on the payment of hush money to women who claim to have had liaisons with Donald Trump about a decade before he became president, including how the reimbursement for those payments was allegedly booked by the Trump real-estate organization. The subpoena, issued to Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars, is believed to be sweeping, seeking voluminous financial information (including tax-return information), over a number of years.
The Court’s ruling against the president is emphatic. It was expected that the president would lose. This seemed obvious during the oral argument, when the Court focused intently on the fact that, while the president was making a broad immunity claim, he was not arguing that he had immunity from being investigated; just that he had immunity from complying with subpoenas — indeed, subpoenas addressed to a third-party agent of his, not to the president himself.