Can Congress, or any other body, subpoena the President&#39;s tax records? President Trump's tax records, and the question of whether Congress can access them, have been on the news for years. In all this time, I've never heard any analyst debate whether or not a president is legally required to release his tax records. In the past, many candidates released their tax records. Is this just a norm as opposed to a rule? Can Congress demand a president release his records? Is the NY attorney subpoenaing Trump's tax records under a different pretense? Is it part of their criminal investigation? Are the laws on this matter regarding private citizens different than for public officials?
There is currently no law requiring a candidate for US President to release tax records to appear on the ballot. Nor is there any law requiring the President to release such records after taking office. There are laws requiring members of congress, and other Federal officials, to make public some limited information about their finances. This is much less than the information that would be included in an income tax return. Congress could pass a law requiring candidates to release their returns, but it seems unlikely that the current Congress will do so. States have broad authority over Federal elections. A state could pass a law requiring a candidate to release his or her returns as a condition of appearing on the ballot. Such a law might be challenged on Due process grounds. This would be an untested legal area, so there is no telling how a court would rule on such a challenge to such a law. Congress, or an individual house of Congress, may subpoena almost any information in pursuit of its investigation function. Investigations must be related to possible legislation, meaning it must be related to a subject about which Congress has power to pass a law. But the relation can be rather remote, as long as the information might inform the judgement of members of congress in considering a possible law. There does not have to be an actual law under consideration. Investigations have been challenged, and in a few cases there have been court rulings that an investigation was not related to possible legislation, and so Congress was not allowed to enforce subpoenas on that subject, nor to compel testimony. But such rulings have been rare. Previous Presidents have asserted, under the name of "Executive privilege", a right not to disclose information, such as internal discussions within the executive branch. This is not explicitly specified by the US Constitution, nor by any law, but has been generally accepted, and in some cases supported by court rulings. No court has ever clearly defined the extent or limits of Executive privilege. A House committee issued a subpoena this year for President Trump's tax records, or some of them. I forget whether this was addressed to the IRS or to the Treasury Dept. This has been challenged in court, and the matter is still in court. I be3live that one of the grounds asserted against the subpoena was that it was not to look into tax issues, as specified in the law authorizing the subpoena. No one yet knows how that case will proceed. The NY State Attorney General is investigating allegations that the Trump Organization, and various individuals, violated NY law, including by falsely reporting campaign expenses and contributions. In pursuit of that investigation, he issued a subpoena for various records which he claims will reveal possible evidence of those illegal actions. He pretty learly has the authority to subpoena records which might be evidence in a criminal case. This subpoena has also been challenged, but seems pretty likely to be upheld. However the subpoena was as part of a Grand Jury investigation, and Grand Jury proceedings, including evidence obtained by subpoena, are by law secret unless an indictment and trial results. So even if the subpoena is upheld, this should not lead to the public release of the records, unless someone is put on trial for some crime, and the records are evidence in that case. Even then the judge can order the records not to be released to the public.
I am not a lawyer either, though I have been through Pennsylvania a few times. The relevant law is 18 Pa.C.S. 5703, which prohibits recording without consent of all parties (Penna is a "two-party consent" state, like Florida and Washington). Unfortunately, violation of that law is a third degree felony, which has a maximum of 7 year prison. A specific instance of someone getting in trouble for recording their boss is Commonwealth v. Smith (Smith used a cell phone to record his boss, then argued that a cell phone isn't a "device"; the court determined that it is, and that was Feb 16 2016 so who knows the final outcome). An attorney in Pennsylvania might be able to tell you how often people actually serve time for violating the law. You should call one.
In all likelihood, the judge's order related to data collection and reselling is not legally enforceable. They weren't parties to the expungement action, so the judge doesn't have jurisdiction over them. And, the First Amendment protects the right to say truthful things pretty absolutely. Arguably, if the sites provided the information without making clear that it might not be current because records were expunged or corrected, there might be a claim for negligent misrepresentation, false light, or even defamation, but I seriously doubt that even those claims would hold up. The language in the order might cause sites to comply out of not legally justified concern, or just a desire to be accurate, even if it is not enforceable. So, it doesn't hurt to bring that information to the attention of such sites and ask them to take down the information. But, when push comes to shove, I very much doubt that you would prevail in court enforcing that order against them. Certainly, if you do nothing, they will do nothing, because they are not psychic and have no idea that the court order related to those records has been entered. Even a valid and enforceable order directed at a party over whom a court has jurisdiction is not effective until the person ordered to comply with it has notice of the order. And, there is no system that gives sites like that notice without you taking action to inform them of an order.
Once a person is sworn in as POTUS, there are only two legal mechanisms for involuntary removal of that person from the office: Article II Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution provides only that: The President ... shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. The 25th Amendment was passed to establish clear procedures of official succession. Its Section 4 also provides an elaborate mechanism whereby "the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide" can precipitate a process that would allow Congress, within 21 days, to transfer the office to the Vice President. Otherwise, there is no contemplation in the law of a "backsies" mechanism for removing a person from the office because "it should have gone to someone else." (The idea that a person who was in the designated line of succession, but in the wrong order, was sworn into office does not seem nearly as problematic as other events that have happened in real history. For example, in the 2000 Presidential Election it was conceivable – and some people probably maintain in fact – that the "loser" of the election would be sworn into office. The U.S. Supreme Court settled the legal questions before the inauguration. However, the realization at the time was that any legal challenges or decisions after that date would be moot, because "election error" is not a cause to remove a sitting U.S. President.) The question of a previous President reappearing, and his successor refusing to cede the office, takes us to the height of speculation. In this case I would merely note that I can find no law pertaining to Presidential Transition in which an outgoing President is "stripped of authority" or "removed from office." Rather, the acting POTUS is effectively the most recent person sworn to the office, and not removed from it.
I think this shows a misunderstanding of the meaning of the GDPR. A data subject has the right to demand information, correction, deletion etc. about some of their data held by some institutions, depending on the legal basis for the data processing. One John Smith does not have the right to see the data of any other data subject named John Smith, and he cannot even demand to know if there are other John Smiths in the database. The data controller has to make reasonable steps to ensure that an individual who seeks account information is in fact the individual who is the data subject. In the case of an email, that's usually easy -- if John Smith can access the mail account jsmith@sample.org, one can assume that he is the John Smith who opened the account. If not, then not. If the data controller has the birthplace and birthdate in their records, they can possibly match that against some government-issue identity document, too, but why would they have that data?
The US election authorities already record who voted in which elections, and that information is a matter of public record. When I was active in politics some years ago, and at one point a candidate for local office, my campaign and others routinely purchased from the state a &quot;voter list&quot; for each district. This list showed each registered voter, with that person's name, address, age (to the nearest year), party of registration if any, and in which of the last several (I think 10) elections that person had voted. These were delivered in electronic form, and could be sorted and analyzed in whatever way the purchaser pleased. I understand that similar lists are available in every US state, I think from a legal point of view, a picture would reveal no more information than these already-public lists, and since they have not been successfully challenged as unconstitutional, I don't see that the pictures would be subject to such a challenge, unless it could be shown that taking such pictures had a chilling effect, that is, that taking them made certain categories of voters, such as minority voters, less likely to vote. I am not aware of any specific federal or state laws on taking pictures of voters. But if there were a chilling effect, that would probably violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Federal Fourteenth amendment. That clause has been central, or at least significant, in most challenges to voter restrictions, both successful and unsuccessful. But since, as far as I know, no state or other US jurisdiction has tried this, there is no caselaw on point, and one cannot be sure how such a case would be resolved. Whether this would be good policy is a very different question, and where it would be politically acceptable is yet another. Neither of those are on topic here on Law.se, although they might be on Politics.SE.
I know of no specific provision of the Constitution that would forbid it. I know of no court case in which it has been found unconstitutional. There's no "irony" clause in the Constitution. Taxation without representation may have been a grievance, but there's no inherent reason why the framers would have had to forbid it. US citizens do still have the "freedom to expatriate" (and avoid taxation) if they renounce their citizenship. There are already other examples of "taxation without representation" in US law (e.g. District of Columbia), which also have not been found unconstitutional in court, as far as I know. In many cases, expatriates can still vote for federal offices, including Congress (e.g. in a state where they used to live, or where a parent used to live). See https://www.fvap.gov/citizen-voter/registration-ballots. The Sixteenth Amendment gives Congress the power to "lay and collect taxes" with few limitations. There is certainly no explicit exception for expatriates. As far as I can tell, it would be constitutional if Congress were to impose an income tax on everybody in the world, regardless of residency or citizenship; it would just be hard to enforce.
Cohen has ethical problems, but this is probably pretty far down the list. If he were lying about the law, though, that could be treated as a violation of Rule 4.1 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct: In the course of representing a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a third person. It could also be a violation of Rule 8.4: A lawyer or law firm shall not ... (c) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation; Although these would be violations of his ethical obligations, they probably do not rise to the level of seriousness that would result in any meaningful punishment. Disbarment would be extremely unlikely, though a censure is conceivable. If someone reported the offense, I would actually expect that the state would decline to investigate at all. Of course, all of this assumes that he was deliberately lying about the state of the law, which I think overestimates his competence. More likely, he's just an idiot and didn't know that he was wrong. Importantly, being wrong about the law isn't unethical; it's a presumption at the foundation of our adversarial justice system.