Trump v. Vance

• Decision Date: 07 October 2019
• Docket Number: 19 Civ. 8694 (VM)
• Citation: 395 F.Supp.3d 283
• Parties: Donald J. TRUMP, Plaintiff, v. Cyrus R. VANCE, Jr., in his official capacity as District Attorney of the County of New York, and Mazars USA, LLP, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

395 F.Supp.3d 283

Donald J. TRUMP, Plaintiff,

v.Cyrus R. VANCE, Jr., in his official capacity as District Attorney of the County of New York, and Mazars USA, LLP, Defendants.

19 Civ. 8694 (VM)

United States District Court, S.D. New York.

Signed October 7, 2019

Alan Samuel Futerfas, Law Offices of Alan S. Futerfas, Marc Lee Mukasey, Mukasey Frenchman & Sklaroff, New York, NY, Patrick Strawbridge, Consovoy McCarthy Park PLLC, Boston, MA, William Consovoy, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, Arlington, VA, for Plaintiff.

Allen James Vickey, Solomon B Shinerock, Carey R. Dunne, I Christopher Conroy, James Henry Graham, New York County District Attorney Office, Major Economic Crimes Bureau, Inbal Paz Garrity, Jerry D. Bernstein, Nicholas Robert Tambone, Blank Rome LLP, New York, NY, for Defendants.

DECISION AND ORDER

VICTOR MARRERO, United States District Judge.

Plaintiff Donald J. Trump ("Plaintiff" or the "President"), filed this action seeking to enjoin enforcement of a grand jury subpoena (the "Mazars Subpoena") issued by Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., in his official capacity as the District Attorney of the County of New York (the "District Attorney"), to the accounting firm Mazars USA, LLP ("Mazars"). (See "Complaint," Dkt. No. 1; "Amended Complaint," Dkt. No. 27.)¹

INTRODUCTION

The President asserts an extraordinary claim in the dispute now before this Court. He contends that, in his view of the President's duties and functions and the allocation of governmental powers between the executive and the judicial branches under the United States Constitution, the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind. Consider the reach of the President's argument. As the Court reads it, presidential immunity would stretch to cover every phase of criminal proceedings, including investigations, grand jury proceedings and subpoenas, indictment, prosecution, arrest, trial, conviction, and incarceration. That constitutional protection presumably would encompass any conduct, at any time, in any forum, whether federal or state, and whether the President acted alone or in concert with other individuals.

Hence, according to this categorical doctrine as presented in this proceeding, the constitutional dimensions of the presidential shield from judicial process are virtually limitless: Until the President leaves office by expiration of his term, resignation, or removal through impeachment and conviction, his exemption from criminal proceedings would extend not only to matters arising from performance of the President's duties and functions in his official capacity, but also to ones arising from his private affairs, financial transactions, and all other conduct undertaken by him as an ordinary citizen, both during and before his tenure in office.

Moreover, on this theory, the President's special dispensation from the criminal law's purview and judicial inquiry would embrace not only the behavior and activities of the President himself, but also extend derivatively so as to potentially immunize the misconduct of any other person, business affiliate, associate, or relative who may have collaborated with the President in committing purportedly unlawful acts and whose offenses ordinarily would warrant criminal investigation and prosecution of all involved.

In practice, the implications and actual effects of the President's categorical rule could be far-reaching. In some circumstances, by raising his protective shield, applicable statutes of limitations could run, barring further investigation and prosecution of serious criminal offenses, thus potentially enabling both the President and any accomplices to escape being brought to justice. Temporally, such immunity would operate to frustrate the administration of justice by insulating from criminal law scrutiny and judicial review, whether by federal or state courts, not only matters occurring during the President's tenure in office, but potentially also records relating to transactions and illegal actions the President and others may have committed before he assumed the Presidency.

This Court cannot endorse such a categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process as being countenanced by the nation's constitutional plan, especially in the light of the fundamental concerns over excessive arrogation of power that animated the Constitution's delicate structure and its calibrated balance of authority among the three branches of the national government, as well as between the federal and state authorities. Hence, the expansive notion of constitutional immunity invoked here to shield the President from judicial process would constitute an overreach of executive power.

The Court recognizes that subjecting the President to some aspects of criminal proceedings could impermissibly interfere with or even incapacitate the President's ability to discharge constitutional functions. Certainly lengthy imprisonment upon conviction would produce that result. But, as elaborated below, and contrary to the President's immunity claim as asserted here, that consequence would not necessarily follow every stage of every criminal proceeding. In particular that concern would not apply to the specific set of facts presented here to which the Court's holding is limited: the President's compliance with a grand jury subpoena issued in the course of a state prosecutor's criminal investigation of conduct and transactions relating to third persons that occurred at least in part prior to the President assuming office, that may or may not have involved the President, but that at this phase of the proceedings demand review of records the President possesses or controls.

Alternatives exist that would recognize such distinctions and reconcile varying effects associated with a claim of presidential immunity in different criminal proceedings and at different stages of the process. The Court rejects the President's theory because, as articulated, such sweeping doctrine finds no support in the Constitution's text or history, or in germane guidance charted by rulings of the United States Supreme Court.

Questions and controversy over the scope of presidential immunity from judicial process, and unqualified invocations of such an exemption as advanced by some Presidents, are not new in the nation's constitutional experience. In fact, disputes concerning the doctrine arose during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Framers' deliberations gave it some consideration. The underlying issues, however, were not explicitly articulated in the text of the charter that emerged from the Convention and thus have remained largely unresolved. Consequently, the only thing truly absolute about presidential immunity from criminal process is the Constitution's silence about the existence and contours of such an exemption, a void the President seeks to fill by the expansive theory he proffers.

Nonetheless, the Founders and courts and legal commentators have repeatedly expressed one overarching concern about the breadth of the President's immunity from judicial process, a fear that served as a vital principle for subsequent court and scholarly review of the question: whether while in office the President stands above the law and absolutely beyond the reach of judicial process in any criminal proceeding. Shunning the concept of the inviolability of the person of the King of England and the bounds of the monarch's protective screen covering the Crown's actions from legal scrutiny, the Founders disclaimed any notion that the Constitution generally conferred similarly all-encompassing immunity upon the President. They gave expression to that rejection by recognizing the duality the President embodied as a unique figure, serving as head of the nation's government, but also existing as a private citizen.² As detailed below, the wisdom of that view has been tested before the courts on various occasions and has been roundly and consistently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court and lower courts.

In numerous rulings, the courts have circumscribed claims of presidential immunity in multiple ways. Specifically, they have held that such protection from judicial process does not extend to civil suits regarding private conduct that occurred before the President assumed office, to responding to subpoenas regarding the conduct of third-persons, and to providing testimony in court proceedings relating to private disputes involving third persons.

The notion of federal supremacy and presidential immunity from judicial process that the President here invokes, unqualified and boundless in its reach as described above, cuts across the grain of these constitutional precedents. It also ignores the analytic framework that the Supreme Court has counseled should guide review of presidential claims of immunity from judicial process. Of equal fundamental concern, the President's claim would tread upon principles of federalism and comity that form essential components of our constitutional structure and the federal/state balance of governmental powers and functions. Bared to its core, the proposition the President advances reduces to the very notion that the Founders rejected at the inception of the Republic, and that the Supreme Court has since unequivocally repudiated: that a constitutional domain exists in this country in which not only the President, but, derivatively, relatives and persons and business entities associated with him in potentially unlawful private activities, are in fact above the law.

Because this Court finds aspects of such a doctrine repugnant to the nation's governmental structure and constitutional values, and for the reasons further stated below, it ABSTAINS from adjudicating this dispute and DISMISSES the President's suit. In the alternative, in the event on appeal abstention were found unwarranted under the circumstances presented here, the Court DENIES the President's motion for...