Bad morning for Trump in court

President Donald Trump’s attorney faced a rough Friday morning at the Second Circuit where a three-judge panel appeared inclined to let a Manhattan grand jury access his tax returns for an ongoing fraud investigation.

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“Are you asking us to change the ways grand juries have worked since time immemorial?” Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Katzmann asked at one point, referring to the traditional secrecy and breadth of their operations.

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Trump initially claimed that a sitting president, his associates and his businesses have immunity from state criminal proceedings — an argument resoundingly rejected by every court that has heard it.

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During his colleague’s withering questioning, U.S. Circuit Judge Pierre Leval referred to the allegations of Trump’s complaint as “contrived” and inquired whether it asked questions that were “irrelevant.”

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Trump has been fighting to keep a grand jury from seeing his financial records since late last year.

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U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier [...] asked [Trump’s attorney William] Consovoy whether there was a document request that Trump would not consider overbroad. Consovoy answered in the negative. “That’s a problem,” responded Lohier

  Courthouse News

"It's investigating fraud with respect to a tax return filed in New York, by a New York taxpayer," said Leval [...] . "It needs to investigate all the documents on which that tax return will be based and there's no reason why that wouldn't include business operations outside the county of New York."

Trump has mounted a new legal challenge to the subpoena following a Supreme Court ruling in July that the president does not have any special immunity to such investigations.

His lawyers are appealing a district court judge's ruling that rejected the claim that the subpoena is overly broad and was issued in bad faith.

They are arguing that the subpoena goes far beyond what had been reported to be the scope of the investigation, namely hush money payments in 2016 to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

"If you were to look up the definition of a fishing expedition, this is it," William Consovoy, Trump's personal attorney, told the court. "The district attorney isn't focused on anything."

The prosecutor's office, led by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. (D), has countered that they have never suggested that the investigation was limited to the payments, which were delivered by Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for his role in the scheme.

  The Hill

Also, it's not unheard of for a case to go before a grand jury and come out with additional charges.

And last month, the prosecutors hinted at a much broader probe into "possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization."

At [today]'s hearing, Judge Raymond Lohier [...] questioned why the court should dictate what the grand jury could and couldn't investigate.

"I think that's a natural conclusion that every grand jury investigation, particularly of this importance, will start to grow, both in terms of the nature of the possible charges that the grand jury is investigating, and in terms of the documents, and witnesses and so on, that may be of interest to the grand jury," Lohier said. "And given that, why should we require a specific allegation that this is the one grand jury investigation that's unique, in that it's stuck, it did not expand beyond the 2016 Cohen payments."

To be continued.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.