Go get 'im, Tish

Earlier this year on Feb. 17, a Manhattan judge ordered Trump and two of his adult children—Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.—to sit for depositions and have the former president provide documents responsive to her subpoena. The Trumps appealed that decision, and the attorney general agreed to put their testimony on hold until that matter is adjudicated. But James said that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron made abundantly clear that former President Trump needed to “comply in full” with the portion of the subpoena seeking additional documents and information from him by March 31.

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New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) wants a judge to find [...] Trump in civil contempt to the tune of $10,000 per day for allegedly flouting [the] judge’s order to comply with her subpoena.

“This Court’s order was not an opening bid for a negotiation or an invitation for a new round of challenges to the subpoena,” the attorney general’s assistant Andrew Amer wrote in a 26-page memorandum on Thursday. “It was, rather, a court order entered after full briefing and argument during which Mr. Trump could have, but did not, raise any of the purported objections or assertions he has now raised.”

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“Under settled law, a party is not permitted to delay proceedings through seriatim submissions to challenge an investigative subpoena, so the ship has long since sailed on Mr. Trump’s ability to raise any such objections,” the memo states.

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“But rather than ‘comply in full’ with the Court’s unambiguous directive by producing all responsive documents by March 31, Mr. Trump did not comply at all,” the AG’s memo asserts. “Instead, he served a ‘Response’ on [the Office of the Attorney General] raising objections to each of the eight document requests in the subpoena based on grounds such as overbreadth, burden, and lack of particularity. Mr. Trump further asserted, subject to his objections, that he would not produce any documents responsive to OAG’s subpoena because his counsel (based on search efforts that have not been divulged) could not find any such documents and because of his counsel’s ‘information and belief’ that if any such documents exist, the Trump Organization has them and OAG will just have to wait until the Trump Organization completes its production to get them.”

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Trump has denounced the civil probe as politically motivated, but Judge Engoron rejected that argument, adding that it would have been “blatant dereliction of duty” on the part of the attorney general’s office not to investigate once his former fixer Michael Cohen accused Trump of cooking the books.

  Law and Crime