By Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall 

WASHINGTON -- President Trump's lawyers asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to quash congressional and criminal subpoenas seeking financial records from his bankers and accountants, as justices expressed concerns about the long-term consequences of the dispute.

In Tuesday's first of two cases, the court considered subpoenas for Trump-related records issued by three House committees that oversee issues on federal ethics, bank secrecy, money-laundering and foreign influence in U.S. elections.

"The subpoenas at issue here are unprecedented in every sense," Trump lawyer Patrick Strawbridge said at the outset of the court's teleconferenced oral arguments. Democratic-led committees were seeking the documents for improper reasons like hounding the president, not for anything related to the passage of legislation, Mr. Strawbridge said.

"These subpoenas are overreaching," he said. "They're an obvious distraction."

House General Counsel Douglas Letter, defending subpoenas the committees issued to Mazars USA LLP, Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp., said the document demands were related to important matters of public interest in which Congress should play a role.

The Trump legal team's arguments "asked you to ignore a massive amount of history," Mr. Letter said.

Justices across the ideological spectrum peppered both sides about the ramifications of their positions.

Several justices asked why Mr. Trump should be able to stop the House from reaching his records when President Nixon, in the Watergate case, and President Clinton, in the Whitewater investigation, were required to comply.

"You say this is one of a kind," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Mr. Strawbridge, but in the Whitewater investigation Mr. Clinton's personal records were subpoenaed from his accountant and Hillary Clinton's billing records were subpoenaed from her former law firm.

Mr. Strawbridge said that Watergate and Whitewater were disputes of "relatively recent vintage." Historical practice over the long haul suggested the House's demands today amounted to "encroachment" upon the president's constitutional prerogatives.

Liberal justices suggested that the president had greater grounds for withholding White House documents than the personal, nonofficial records at issue. Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, representing the Justice Department, which is supporting Mr. Trump, said the opposite was true: Congress's interest in reviewing official activity was greater than inquiring into personal matters.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Mr. Wall to distinguish the Trump case from the Whitewater subpoena of Mr. Clinton's private records. "I'll grant that subpoena looks very much like this one," Mr. Wall said, but "it was never litigated" and therefore had not been approved by the Supreme Court.

While Mr. Trump's advocates had difficulty explaining why he should be able to stop subpoenas when Presidents Nixon and Clinton couldn't, Mr. Letter ran into trouble when justices asked whether any legal guardrails should stop lawmakers from abusing their investigatory power to harass political enemies.

"What I hold today will also apply to a future Senator [ Joseph] McCarthy" harassing a future President Franklin Roosevelt, Justice Stephen Breyer said, referring to the Wisconsin lawmaker who used congressional proceedings to smear witnesses as communist infiltrators.

Both liberal and conservative justices made clear they were seeking limiting principles that would prevent Congress from exercising unbridled subpoena authority, given that almost every issue of public concern could conceivably be tied to potential legislation. "That's very, very broad, and maybe limitless," Justice Neil Gorsuch said.

"We're concerned, as you've recognized, with the potential for harassment," Chief Justice John Roberts told Mr. Letter.

Justice Elena Kagan, meanwhile, suggested Congress may need to demonstrate some heightened need for the information it is requesting, at least in some circumstances.

The second case, although it involved much of the same information sought by the House, raises different legal questions. There, a New York state prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., is seeking records he suggests could point to financial crimes by the Trump Organization, including hush-money payments to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Mr. Trump, allegations the president has denied.

Jay Sekulow, another of Mr. Trump's private lawyers, said that his client's records were immune from subpoena while he remained in the White House. Otherwise, he suggested that local political pressures, such as those felt by state judges and prosecutors in New York who must run for office, could lead to relentless harassment of the president.

"No county district attorney in our nation's history has issued criminal process against the sitting president of the United States, and for good reason: The Constitution does not allow it," Mr. Sekulow said.

Carey Dunne, the lawyer representing the district attorney, said such speculation was unfounded. He observed that the Trump Organization was based in Mr. Vance's jurisdiction and that multiple reports and legal proceedings had pointed to possible wrongdoing there. In contrast, he said, prosecutors elsewhere likely lacked any legal basis to investigate the president's records, and courts could step in to quash unfounded grand-jury investigations.

"When a president acts as a private individual, he or she has responsibilities like every other citizen, including compliance with legal process," Mr. Dunne told the justices. "In particular, this court has long held that American presidents are not above having to provide evidence in response to a law-enforcement inquiry."

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 12, 2020 14:20 ET (18:20 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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