Andrew  Napolitano

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano says President Donald Trump could receive some news from the Supreme Court just before the holidays ― and it might not be a “Merry Christmas.” 

Trump plans to appeal a ruling this week that ordered his accounting firm to comply with a grand jury subpoena to give his tax returns to prosecutors in New York. Napolitano said that appeal would go first to Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an attempt to stay the decision, then possibly to the full Supreme Court. 

“If the Supreme Court were to hear this, I think they would hear it on an emergency basis, meaning before Christmas,” he said. “They know how important this is.”

Napolitano also laid out the arguments in the ruling that might not fill Trump with holiday cheer. First, the appeals court ruled against Trump’s argument that he was immune from criminal prosecution because the case wasn’t a criminal prosecution. It’s an investigation into payments by the Trump Organization to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom said they had affairs with the president and were paid to keep quiet.  

“No one is immune from the government investigating their behavior,” Napolitano said.

The court also ruled that the subpoena doesn’t place any burden on Trump as president because it’s not aimed at him. It’s directed at his accounting firm. The federal appeals court, Napolitano said, ruled that the subpoena “doesn’t require him to do anything that might be disruptive of his job as president.”

In a separate appearance on the network, Napolitano said that if New York prosecutors obtained Trump’s tax returns and found evidence of a crime, the courts would be in uncharted legal waters.

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.