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Almost immediately after the ruling, one of the president’s personal lawyers, Jay Sekulow, said Trump would appeal to the Supreme Court. The president maintains that the Constitution shields him from any criminal investigation..
“The issue raised in this case goes to the heart of our republic,” Sekulow said. “The constitutional issues are significant.”
The case will almost certainly be the first one involving Trump’s personal conduct and business dealings to reach the high court. The court is not required to hear the case, but the significance of the issues involved suggests that it will. A decision on the case may come by June, as the presidential election enters its final stages.
Other cases involving Trump are also in the pipeline. They involve matters as diverse as demands from House Democrats for tax and business records, a request for access to redacted portions of the report prepared by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and challenges to Trump’s business arrangements under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.
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Last month, for instance, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Trump’s accounting firm must comply with the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s demands for eight years of his financial records. Trump has asked the full appeals court to rehear that case.
In a different case last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the House Judiciary Committee was entitled to see secret grand jury evidence gathered by Mueller.
Trump has fought vigorously to shield his financial records, and prosecutors in Manhattan have agreed not to seek the tax returns until the case is resolved by the Supreme Court.
In its ruling Monday, the three-judge appeals panel did not take a position on the president’s biggest argument: that he was immune from all criminal investigations. A lower court had called that argument “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”
Instead, the appeals court said the president’s accounting firm, not Trump himself, was subpoenaed for the documents, so it did not matter whether presidents had immunity.
This article originally appeared in
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