Good evening, I’m still reporting on Trump.
According to the mainstream media, President Trump suffered a major defeat in the Supreme Court cases over his tax returns.
The headlines were positively gleeful about Trump being ordered to turn over his tax returns. Some people probably picked up their newspaper the next day expecting all kinds of salacious material about Trump’s finances.
Is it any surprise that the mainstream media is wrong? The ruling doesn’t mean that Trump has to turn over his tax returns to anybody. It does mean that he might have to turn over some of his tax returns to a grand jury in New York at some point in the future. But that future is most likely far away and almost certainly after the 2020 election.
The ruling did open a path for the grand jury in New York to obtain Trump’s tax returns, but didn’t guarantee it, and there is still a lot of legal water to flow under that bridge before it happens.
What the ruling did was end one legal argument that Trump’s lawyers were making as to why Trump’s tax returns should not be turned over to anybody.
But there are other legal avenues to be explored, and the Supremes even recommended Trump’s lawyers try some of them.
Court cases in this country take forever. It’s easy to read that attorneys have 30 days to produce something and think in 30 days it will be produced. But then toward the end of the 30 days the attorneys ask for a continuance, then there may be a preliminary a hearing on the continuance, then briefs and responses to briefs are filed by both sides on the request for a continuance. Then a hearing is scheduled, oops, but it has to be delayed because the judge will be out of the country.
Finally, the continuance is granted or denied, which doesn’t make much difference at that point because the attorneys have already racked up more time arguing about the continuance than the continuance they requested.
And it is on to the next issue.
Trump’s attorneys in this case really only have to delay turning anything over to anybody until after the November election. If it’s not an election issue, people can use whatever information they find in the tax returns to demean Trump, but his opponents don’t really need any more information to do that – they attack Trump for everything he does anyway.
Even if the Supreme Court ruling did not send the case back to a lower court and had ordered the tax returns presented immediately to the grand jury, it wouldn’t mean anyone would get to see them except the grand jury, because evidence before a grand jury is sealed and in most cases that seal is taken very seriously. It’s not like top secret information in the Trump White House that people who worked for Trump were willing to send to The New York Times on what appeared to be an hourly basis.
So was the Supreme Court ruling a “Stunning Defeat For Trump”? No. It wasn’t a victory either. If the mainstream media had been writing about Barack Obama instead of Trump, they would have described it as a “Temporary Set Back.”
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of American freedom. Good day.