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Trump Must Hand Over Tax Returns to Manhattan DA Vance, Judge Rules (Again)

A federal judge dismissed Trump’s second attempt to block the Manhattan DA’s probe and upheld a subpoena that will allow investigators to access years of tax returns.

A federal judge on Thursday rejected President Trump’s second attempt to block the Manhattan district attorney from obtaining years of his tax returns as part of an ongoing probe. Judge Victor Marrero—who originally presided over the case and denied the president’s efforts to block District Attorney Cyrus Vance from subpoenaing eight years of tax returns—upheld Vance’s subpoena and dismissed Trump’s attempt to once again block Vance. Last August, Vance’s office issued a subpoena to Mazars, the president’s accounting firm, as part of the investigation into hush-money payments allegedly made to several women before the 2016 election.

In his Thursday ruling, Marrero wrote that he could not “mechanically credit” the president’s arguments that the subpoena was “wildly over-broad” was “unduly burdensome and motivated by bad faith.” The judge then compared the president’s argument to an attempt to get “absolute immunity through a back door.” Marrero dismissed with prejudice, effectively preventing Trump from bringing new arguments against the subpoena to the court. The latest blow to Trump’s legal team also comes after a 7-2 decision by the Supreme Court in July, siding with Vance in the belief that Trump should not get absolute immunity as a sitting president. But they sent the case back to the lower courts for a final decision on the specific subpoena issue.