Pass the Popcorn

Without comment, the Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump's bid to conceal his tax returns from the Manhattan prosecutor:

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected former president Donald Trump’s last-chance effort to keep his private financial records from the Manhattan district attorney, ending a long and drawn-out legal battle.

After a four-month delay, the court denied Trump’s motion in a one-sentence order with no recorded dissents.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has won every stage of the legal fight — including the first round at the Supreme Court — but has yet to receive the records he says are necessary for a grand jury investigation into whether the president’s companies violated state law.

Vance responded to the court decision with a three-word tweet: “The work continues.”

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Vance’s inquiry is one of two known criminal investigations involving the former president. The other, led by the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, focuses on Trump’s controversial coversations with state officials amid his failed effort to overturn that state’s election result.

Trump has waged an extraordinary battle to keep private his tax records, which every other modern president has released as an expected part of seeking the presidency. The court’s action does not mean Trump’s tax records are to become public — Vance has said they will be protected by grand jury secrecy rules — but is likely to accelerate an investigation that might be Trump’s biggest legal threat.

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Forensic accounting experts from FTI Consulting are expected to assist prosecutors in assessing whether the Trump Organization manipulated property values for tax breaks, or to obtain favorable loan rates, The Washington Post previously reported.

The investigation is fairly developed, but the tax returns are an integral part of the picture. The Supreme Court order — allowing Vance to execute the subpoena — could mean a lot of work is ahead for investigators as the records are voluminous, spanning eight years.

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The current fight is a follow-up to a July decision by the high court that the president is not immune from a criminal investigation while he holds office.

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Vance is seeking eight years of the former president’s tax returns and related documents as part of what was initially an investigation into alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years before — claims Trump denies. Investigators have indicated they want to determine whether efforts were made to conceal the payments on tax documents by labeling them as legal expenses.

I'm expecting the investigations to reveal that Trump is basically broke, despite the millions that he managed to extract from the government and government supplicants.

I will love to see him broken like a yearling horse, and I know that he's going to whine about conspiracies, but, "That’s what I thought you'd say, you dumb f%$#ing horse."^*

^*Credit where credit is due, I am quoting comedian John Mullaney.