MANHATTAN (CN) – Donald Trump is a president and not a king, a federal judge wrote in a scathing ruling on Monday morning, throwing out a lawsuit that would shield him, his businesses and his associates from New York state subpoenas.
Finding that the fight was not a federal one, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero dismissed Trump’s lawsuit challenging the probe.
“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,” Marrero wrote in a 75-page opinion.
Before the subpoena could be enforced this afternoon, the Second Circuit ordered a temporary stay in connection to an emergency appeal filed by Trump’s attorneys. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance in turn is requesting that the Second Circuit fast-track Trump’s appeal, holding a hearing before the end of the week.
Until that appeal arrives, Judge Marrero’s ruling stands as an excoriating rebuke to what he described as a “virtually limitless” assertion of executive power.
“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,” the opinion states.
Marrero found “such a doctrine repugnant to the nation's governmental structure and constitutional values.”
The Manhattan district attorney subpoenaed the accounting firm Mazars USA earlier this year as part of a criminal investigation into hush-money payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, seeking eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns.
Just before the original deadline of that subpoena arose, Trump brought a lawsuit that said that no prosecutor, federal or state can subject a sitting president, his businesses or his allies to the criminal process while he is in office, even if that investigation involves conduct that preceded his term in office.
Responding to Judge Marrero's ruling Monday, the president took to Twitter. "The Radical Left Democrats have failed on all fronts, so now they are pushing local New York City and State Democrat prosecutors to go get President Trump," he wrote. "A thing like this has never happened to any President before. Not even close!"
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation ended without Trump’s indictment or exoneration, largely owing to memos from the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel that say a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime.