Appeals Court Smacks Down Trump Attempt To Block Dems

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That “winning” that Donald Trump promised before taking office as president is not materializing, at least in cases in which he’s been fighting to keep investigators from accessing his financial information. This week, a N.Y,-area federal appeals court denied Trump’s request to block a subpoena from Congressional Democrats for his financial records. They’re seeking the material from Deutsche Bank and Capital One, and their repeated success in this case comes on the heels of repeated rulings in favor of other Congressional subpoenas demanding Trump’s tax information from his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA.

In this case, the court was quite blunt in insisting that Trump could, essentially, not derail the entire established and duly proceeding course of Congressional inquiry just because his ego might struggle through the aftermath.

They shared, discussing the Democratic majority House committees behind the subpoenas:

‘The Committees’ interests in pursuing their constitutional legislative function is a far more significant public interest than whatever public interest inheres in avoiding the risk of a Chief Executive’s distraction arising from disclosure of documents reflecting his private financial transactions.’

As CNN notes:

‘In this case, Trump sued to block a subpoena to Deutsche Bank and Capital One seeking financial records for Trump, his family and his business. A lower court judge denied Trump’s request for a preliminary injunction and Trump appealed the ruling.’

The material, if Democrats successfully end up getting their hands on it, could provide Congress with a chance to see if, quite simply, Donald Trump broke the law. He’s been credibly accused of tax, insurance, and bank fraud. Considering the precedent of the Trump team appealing unfavorable decisions for as long as possible, the next stop for this case might be the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeals court’s ruling included a seven day timeframe for the Trump team to come up with an appeal.

In other cases, the Trump team has already tried to contort the concept of executive privilege in an attempt to block access to private information, no matter its relevance to judicial investigations — but that’s not working. Besides these financial records cases, just recently, a federal judge demanded that former White House counsel Don McGahn comply with a Congressional subpoena for testimony. In the time since that ruling, House Democrats have formally filed suit against current Trump officials including Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who’ve defied subpoenas for material covering their failed attempt to include a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census.

These are far from the only legal troubles facing the Trump team lately. Recently, a federal court even ruled in favor of the impeachment inquiry, insisting that it’s a plenty valid enough judicial proceeding to warrant access to grand jury proceedings from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. That ruling came as Democrats continued to briskly proceed with their investigation. This week will see the latest stage get underway with a public hearing at the House Judiciary Committee following fact-finding by the intelligence panel, which included damaging testimony from many current and former administration officials.