The release of Donald Trump’s tax returns just got fast tracked in a big way

| 10:40 pm EDT September 16, 2019
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There are currently numerous efforts underway to expose Donald Trump’s tax returns, some of which are likely to succeed more quickly than others. Trump’s Treasury Department will never give them up. Deutsche Bank will only give them up if the courts instruct it to. But now a new avenue for obtaining Trump’s tax returns is underway, and it could actually happen rather quickly.

Today we learned that a New York grand jury has issued a subpoena to Donald Trump’s accountant for eight years of Trump’s federal tax returns, thanks to NBC News. Here’s the thing. The President of the United States and the Department of Justice have no jurisdiction over what a state level grand jury does. Nor do they have any legal standing to stop Trump’s accountant from complying with this subpoena.

More to the point, if Trump’s accountant defies this grand jury subpoena, the accountant will be held in contempt and arrested. So unless this accountant is enough of an idiot to throw his life away in order to protect Trump, he’ll end up complying – and it may not take all that long for it to happen.

The big question of course is whether this ends up playing out before the 2020 election. But that gives the New York grand jury and prosecutors more than a year to convince this accountant that prison isn’t a good look. We very much doubt they’ll need anything close to that long. The prospect of Trump’s tax returns being released before the election just became a probability. The real question is whether New York will indict Trump on state charges before, or immediately after, the election.