The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an Order to Expedite the lawsuit between Trump and the House Intelligence Committee. This sets a timetable for a summer showdown in which the truth about Trump’s shadowy loans and financial records could finally be revealed.
When Congress sought to get Donald Trump’s taxes, financial information, and loan applications, the response was immediate. Trump ordered Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to block release of his tax returns, despite a clear law that the forms must be released on demand. When House Oversight issued a subpoena to accounting firm Mazars USA for Trump’s financial records, he responded with a lawsuit that included personally suing committee chairman Elijah Cummings. And Trump drafted his non-Tiffany adult children for a family lawsuit designed to block a subpoena for loan information from scandal-plagued Deutsche Bank and Capital One.
Last week, both of Trump’s lawsuits failed in court. The Southern District of New York tossed Trump’s suit to block access to the banking information. The D.C. District court bounced Trump’s effort to quash the subpoena for the financial records. Both decisions made it clear that Trump’s suits were little short of frivolous.
As expected, both cases were immediately appealed. And, as The Hill reports, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on Friday morning to give the appeal on the banking information expedited handling. Even so, oral arguments on the case will probably not be heard before the end of July. A similar timeline is underway on the financial records case. No matter the outcome, it can be expected that both cases will be on the way to the Mitch McConnell-rigged Supreme Court in September. But even with Justice Beer in place, should the appeals courts agree with the clear decisions at the district court level, the cases may not even be taken up by the top court.
Trump is clearly desperate to block this information from reaching either Congress or the public. And according to a new book from Michael Wolff, there’s a good reason for that concern. Wolff indicates that it’s the release of the financial information, not the Mueller report, that really scares Trump. In the book, he quotes Trump adviser Steve Bannon as saying that “investigations into Trump’s finances will cut adrift even his most ardent supporters.”
What could be the end for a con man who has survived every other scandal? “This is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth $50 million instead of $10 billion. Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag.”
Wolff’s book details some of Trump’s “business acumen” in the form of stabbing friends in the back, money laundering, and simply lying about his net worth. As an example, the infamous 2004 deal in which Trump bought a Palm Beach mansion for $40 million and sold it for $100 million after doing little more than slapping on some paint, seemed to check every box on a list of crooked dealings. Trump didn’t spot the property on his own, but was told about it by his child sex ring pal Jeffrey Epstein who planned to buy the house. Trump went around Epstein and snagged the property using a loan from Deutsche Bank, which gave Trump the cash even though no other bank was willing to loan money to the six-time bankrupt “mogul.” And finally, the sale to Kremlin insider Dmitry Rybolovlev might not have actually netted Trump over $50 million in profit, but turned most of that money back to Rybolovlev as nice clean American dollars.
Lawyers for the House have agreed to not attempt to enforce the subpoenas until the expedited cases have been heard by the appeals court. But short of direct intervention by the Supreme Court, the clock would seem to be ticking toward Just Another Scumbag Day.