A new federal court filing from the Manhattan district attorney's office suggests Donald Trump and his family business are the subjects of a wide-ranging banking and insurance fraud investigation, according to The New York Times.
Prosecutors working for Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance argued in the filing that the subpoena they issued should compel Trump to provide eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns. Trump's lawyers have urged a federal judge to invalidate the subpoena, but the DA's office wants the challenge dismissed.
While the filing didn't elaborate on the investigation, the prosecutors cited "undisputed" reporting from last year pertaining to Trump and his business practices. Some of that reporting focused on the congressional testimony of Trump's former lawyer/fixer, Michael Cohen, who said that Trump often used illegal accounting schemes to either inflate or deflate his real estate assets for banking and insurance purposes. Vance's office originally subpoenaed the tax returns from Trump's accounting firm Mazars USA in 2019, but the probe was believed to be more narrowly focused on the hush money payments Trump made in the run-up to the 2016 election to silence two women with whom he had affairs.
Vance's new filing comes on the heels of a decisive 7-2 Supreme Court ruling last month rejecting Trump's assertion that he shouldn't have to comply with the subpoena seeking his financial records. That ruling sent the case back to the lower courts, where Trump would be allowed to challenge specific parts of Vance's probe.
“In our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence,’ ” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the first sentence of the high court's majority opinion in Trump v. Vance. “Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.”
Vance's office has argued in court that Trump's lawyers are simply trying to delay the subpoena until the statute of limitations invalidates the case.