#Appeals court to rule on Trump’s tax returns by end of day

An appeals court will rule Tuesday on President Trump’s bid to block the release of his tax returns — after a judge quizzed a lawyer for the Manhattan District Attorney about the breadth of their investigation into the president in a hearing Tuesday morning.

In oral arguments in front of the 2nd Circuit Court, Carey Dunne, the lawyer for Manhattan DA Cy Vance, challenged Trump’s assertion that their investigation into him is “overly broad.”

Dunne argued that Trump and his attorneys have incorrectly claimed that Vance’s investigation into him is solely related to hush-money payments that fixer Michael Cohen made during the 2016 presidential election to porn stars who claimed to have had affairs with the president.

In addition to a subpoena the Trump Organization received related to the hush-money payments, Trump’s accounting firm Mazars also received a subpoena — evidence, the president claims, that the investigation is a fishing expedition.

Dunne said the president and his attorneys purposefully highlighted the hush-money payments as the sole focus of Vance’s investigation, without knowing the full scope of the probe.

“Of course the focus can shift and expand over time,” Dunne said.

One of the judges on the panel asked Dunne how the president’s legal team could be expected to measure “overbreadth” in the probe if they do not know how wide-ranging the investigation is.

“Shouldn’t there be an ability to measure overbreadth?” Judge John Walker asked Dunne.

“It seems to me there is no way of measuring overbreadth,” he added.

Trump’s legal team has repeatedly blasted the subpoena as a “wildly overbroad” witchhunt into the president’s financial dealings.

In a filing in the case filed Monday night, Trump’s attorneys argued that Vance should not be able to “run roughshod” over the president and said the “the deck was clearly stacked against” Trump in the case.

Trump is seeking a delay in the documents being released, and a stay to be granted until they can appeal to the Supreme Court if a delay is rejected.

The appeals court will issue its ruling later Tuesday.