Federal judge rules Trump must turn over his tax returns to Manhattan DA, but Trump has appealed

A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s lawsuit seeking to block the Manhattan district attorney from obtaining the president’s tax returns as part of an investigation into hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign. That decision does not mean Trump’s tax returns will be handed over immediately. Trump appealed within minutes, and an appeals court put the case on hold until it can hear the president’s challenge.
But Monday’s ruling by U.S. Judge Victor Marrero was still a broad rejection of Trump’s precedent-shattering argument in this case.
The president argued that, as long as he is president, he cannot be investigated by any prosecutor, anywhere, for any reason.
Marrero said that was “repugnant” to an American ideal as old as the Constitution: that no man, even a president, is above the law.
“The Court cannot square a vision of presidential immunity that would place the President above the law with the text of the Constitution, the historical record, the relevant case law” or any other authority, Marrero wrote.
“This Court cannot endorse such a categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process,” he wrote in another section of his 75-page ruling.
Trump reacted on Twitter, writing that Democrats “have failed on all fronts, so now they are pushing local New York City and State Democratic prosecutors to go get President Trump. A thing like this has never happened to any President before. Not even close!”
Jay Sekulow, a private attorney for the president, struck a more positive tone: “We are very pleased that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has issued a stay of the subpoena.”
The lower court decision marked a key setback for Trump, who has taken an unorthodox, aggressive approach to fighting off investigations from prosecutors and congressional committees seeking his tax returns and financial documents. He has sued the investigators and the companies they subpoenaed, including his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA and two of Trump’s banks.
Judges have ruled against Trump twice in other cases, but those lawsuits are still tied up in appeals in New York and Washington, and the subpoenas have not been enforced.
In this lawsuit, Trump said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) did not need eight years of his tax returns to examine whether any laws were broken by the 2016 payments. He called the subpoena to Mazars “a bad faith effort to harass the President by obtaining and exposing his private financial information, not a legitimate attempt to enforce New York law.”