POLITICO
Judge set to rule on Trump’s subpoena challenge
The decision could provide a blueprint for other judges deciding on the president’s attempts to stop congressional investigations.
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY
05/14/2019 05:12 AM EDT
The ruling from Judge Amit Mehta (left) will represent a flashpoint in the myriad disputes between the White House and Congress. | Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
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President Donald Trump’s strategy of outright resistance to House subpoenas will face its first test in federal court on Tuesday, setting up a ruling that could boost Democrats’ efforts to investigate the president’s business dealings.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta is set to rule on the Democrat-led House Oversight and Reform Committee’s subpoena to accounting firm Mazars USA for eight years of Trump’s financial records. The committee’s demand is part of its investigation into alleged financial crimes committed by Trump.
Trump filed suit seeking to invalidate the subpoena three weeks ago — the first of two lawsuits aimed at hobbling House Democrats’ investigations targeting his administration, presidential campaign and business empire.
Mehta’s ruling will represent a flashpoint in the myriad disputes between the White House and Congress — marking the first time the judiciary weighs in on Trump’s blanket strategy of refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas and oversight requests from House Democrats.
Trump and his Republican allies have argued that the subpoena was politically motivated and amounts to an abuse of Congress’ authority to conduct oversight of the executive branch. Democrats have said Trump’s court challenges are frivolous efforts to delay legitimate probes, part of what they say is a broad “stonewalling” effort by the Trump administration.
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Mehta is expected to deliver his decision after an 11 a.m. hearing at a Washington federal district courthouse. The judge decided to expedite the process, contending he already learned enough to rule without hearing in-person arguments by Trump lawyers or the House general counsel.
That move bodes poorly for Trump. It suggests the judge didn’t want to drag out the case as Democrats seek to quickly gather evidence of Trump’s alleged financial impropriety. On Monday, ahead of the hearing, Trump’s attorneys telegraphed those concerns in a new court filing and asked Mehta to cancel the hearing altogether and set a trial date.
“While Plaintiffs understand the Court’s desire to decide this case efficiently, resolving it in this way—and on this schedule—will severely prejudice Plaintiffs,” Trump attorney William S. Consovoy wrote.
Douglas Letter, general counsel for the House of Representatives, backed Mehta’s plan to rule from the bench, saying in a court filing that Consovoy’s “complaint lacks merit and an expeditious resolution of the subpoena’s validity is necessary for the committee’s investigations to continue.”
Mehta later formally denied Consovoy’s request, writing in a brief order Monday night: “The hearing will proceed tomorrow as scheduled.”
Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) issued the so-called friendly subpoena to Mazars, which asked for the subpoena so that it could comply with the request. He issued it just days after Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and fixer, provided documents to the Oversight panel purportedly showing that the president artificially inflated and deflated the value of his assets in order to benefit financially.
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Cohen in February disclosed several of Trump’s financial statements which were submitted to Deutsche Bank in 2014 as Trump was seeking a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills NFL team. Cohen told lawmakers that the documents showed that Trump inflated the value of certain assets in order to secure the loan.
The committee says it needs Trump’s financial records from Mazars as part of its efforts to corroborate Cohen’s allegations.
Trump’s lawyers argue the subpoena is defective because it relies so heavily on Cohen’s testimony.
“Chairman Cummings requested this information because Michael Cohen—a felon who has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress—told the House Oversight Committee that the President had misrepresented his net worth while he was a private citizen,” Trump’s attorneys wrote, calling it “one of the worst examples of the House Democrats’ zeal to attack President Trump.”
Mehta’s ruling could provide a blueprint for other judges deciding on Trump’s attempts to thwart congressional investigations. Trump has also filed suit to block the House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees from subpoenaing Deutsche Bank and Capital One, where many of his business and personal financial records are housed.
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Trump’s attorneys have argued that House Democrats’ efforts to obtain Trump’s records are political grenades masked as efforts to conduct legitimate investigations. Democrats just want to damage the president politically ahead of his reelection fight, they argue, and their subpoenas are illegitimate because there’s no underlying effort to support possible legislation that could arise.
“Democrats are using their new control of congressional committees to investigate every aspect of President Trump’s personal finances, businesses, and even his family,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “Instead of working with the President to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the President politically.”
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If Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama, rules in favor of House Democrats, it may be House Republicans’ previous court battles that helped provide the road map. In 2017, House Intelligence Committee Republicans successfully sued Fusion GPS — a research firm hired by Democrats that commissioned the so-called Steele dossier alleging a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy to influence the 2016 election — for the firm’s financial records.
In that case, Judge Richard Leon — a George W. Bush appointee — indicated that Congress had broad authority to define the legitimate “legislative purpose” of its demands for information.
“This court will not — and indeed, may not — engage in a line-by-line review of the committee’s requests,” Leon wrote at the time.
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And relevance re executive privilege :
ABCNews
House panel opens inquiry into claims Trump legal team edited Michael Cohen’s testimony
By Lucien Bruggeman
May 14, 2019, 6:55 PM ET
WATCH: The president said Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, lied “a lot” but added that he was surprised his former fixer did not lie about the Russia probe.
The Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee has launched an investigation into claims brought forth by Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, who has suggested that members of President Donald Trump’s legal team edited his statement to Congress about a prospective Trump Tower-Moscow project.
During public testimony in March, before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen said Trump’s current personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, changed his statement to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees regarding the duration of those discussions before he submitted it to Capitol Hill.
In his initial statement to Congress, Cohen said discussions about the Moscow project ended in January of 2016, when in reality conversations about the prospective deal continued through the summer of 2016 – well after Trump became the Republican nominee for president. Federal prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s office later wrote that Cohen also sought to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1,” referring to then-candidate Trump.
Rep. Adam Schiff appears on a Washington Post Live discussion on the Mueller Report, April 30, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
Cohen, who is currently serving a three-year prison term at the federal corrections facility in Otisville, New York, pleaded guilty late last year to lying to Congress about the content of that statement. Sekulow has denied the claims, writing in a statement at the time that “today’s testimony by Michael Cohen that attorneys for the President edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false.”
Since March, the House Intelligence Committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has exchanged a series of letters with attorneys representing members of Trump’s legal team. News of the nascent investigation and Schiff’s letters to the attorneys was first reported Tuesday by the New York Times.
Schiff, in a statement released Tuesday, said his committee would be “negligent not to pursue” Cohen’s claims.
“The materials we are requesting in these letters go to the heart of that investigation and to Congress’s ability to conduct meaningful oversight,” Schiff said.
Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney of President Donald Trump, arrives to testify to the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., March 6, 2019.
An attorney representing the president’s legal team, Patrick Strawbridge, said in a statement of his own that his clients intend to resist complying with the committee’s request, citing “one of the oldest and most sacred privileges in the law … attorney-client privilege.”
In a letter addressed to Schiff in April, Strawbridge wrote, “we are at a loss to see how that charge justifies your sweeping and unprecedented requests to our clients.”
Schiff, in response, wrote that a “bare assertion of privilege without any particularized discussion of specific documents or communications is woefully inadequate to meet your burden of establishing the elements necessary to support a valid claim of privilege.”
During his closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March, Cohen shared documents and emails with committee members showing what he said were edits to the false statement he provided to Congress in 2017, in an effort to bolster his public testimony, two sources familiar with the matter said at the time. ABC News has not independently reviewed the nature of those edits.
In addition to the charges of lying to Congress, Cohen also pleaded guilty late last year to campaign finance violations and a slew of tax- and bank-fraud.
ABC News’ John Santucci and Benjamin Siegel contributed reporting
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