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Trump Fights Back, Sues Manhattan DA over Tax Records Subpoenas

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It’s the latest round in a long-running battle, but the Trump team is proving it’s got plenty of fight.

President Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow announced Thursday that the president has filed a lawsuit against Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance over a subpoena Vance’s office had issued seeking Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns for the past eight years, according to The Independent.

In a statement, according to CNBC, Sekulow said the subpoena raised “significant constitutional issues.”

“In response to the subpoenas issued by the New York County District Attorney, we have filed a lawsuit this morning in Federal Court on behalf of the President in order to address the significant constitutional issues at stake in this case,” he said.

The lawsuit also names Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, National Review reported.

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The development is just the newest twist in a saga that stems from even before Trump shocked the political world with his upset of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

From his days on the campaign trail, Trump has outraged Democrats and the liberal media by refusing to release his tax returns, as past presidents have done.

In refusing, he has maintained that his taxes are being audited by the IRS and he would consider releasing them after that is complete.

That was never satisfactory, though, and Democrats have moved at various levels to get their hands on documents they no doubt hope will contain information that could embarrass Trump or even implicate him in wrongdoing.

Do you think the constant demands for Trump's tax records are just harassment?

The latest subpoenas were issued in August but not made public until The New York Times reported them Monday.

That report stated the records were part of Vance’s office investigation into a payment Trump made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump back in 2006.

Daniels became known to the public in 2018, when The Wall Street Journal published a report revealing that in 2016, shortly before the November presidential election, then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 in return for a nondisclosure agreement.

Trump has denied any sexual encounter with Daniels.

Besides the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, Trump has been under attack by Democrats in Congress, where the House Ways and Means Committee in May issued subpoenas to the Treasure Department and the IRS seeking six years of Trump tax returns, The New York Times reported in the spring.

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Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee has also issued subpoenas to Trump businesses and Mazars USA demanding years worth of tax records, according to a CBS News report from April. Trump has sued over those subpoenas as well.

For Trump supporters, the legal moves are of a piece with the political opposition and warfare in the courts that the president has faced from even before he took the oath of office.

“It’s just harassment of the president, his family and his business, using subpoenas as weapons,” Trump lawyer Marc Mukasey told The New York Times in August.

And as the Trump team has proven ever since the GOP primaries, it’s not shy about fighting back.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
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