Trump’s lawyers filed the rewritten lawsuit in a Manhattan federal court on Monday to challenge the subpoena filed by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in 2019, claiming that Vance’s request was “wildly overbroad,” “issued in bad faith” and “amounts to harassment of the President,” the New York Times reported.
Trump’s legal representatives also requested that a federal judge in Manhattan rule Vance's request as “invalid and unenforceable” and asked that the judge issue an order blocking Vance from “taking any action to enforce” the subpoena.
Vance subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA in August 2019 for eight years of Trump's personal tax returns and returns related to his family business.
The arguments by Trump’s legal team come just a few weeks after the US Supreme Court allowed prosecutors in New York to seek his financial records, after Trump repeatedly argued that a sitting president is exempt from state criminal investigations.
“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the ruling earlier this month.
Although the US Supreme Court rejected Trump’s position on immunity, it did allow the legal battle over his financial records to return to the lower court where it started.
Vance’s office has accused the president of prolonging the subpoena battle to safeguard himself from any criminal investigation.
“What the president’s lawyers are seeking here is delay,” Carey Dunne, a senior lawyer in Vance’s office, recently said in a hearing before the lower court’s judge, Victor Marrero, the Times reported. “I think that’s the entire strategy here.”