Dec. 12 (UPI) -- House attorneys have urged the Supreme Court to deny President Donald Trump's stay blocking a subpoena that requires two financial institutions hand over his records to the Democrats.
House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter urged the Supreme Court in a court filing Wednesday to deny Trump's stay as further delay limits the House's ability to fulfill its constitutional duties and to safeguard the U.S. election system from foreign meddling.
"Legislative efforts to secure the financial system from abuse have obvious importance," Letter said. "And nothing is more urgent than efforts to guard against foreign influence in our systems for electing officials, particularly given the upcoming 2020 elections."
The filing comes less than a week after the Supreme Court granted Trump a temporary stay that ends Friday blocking Congress from enforcing a subpoena requiring Deutsche Bank and Capital One to hand over documents to the House intelligence and financial services committees.
Related
The Supreme Court will decide if it will extend the stay to allow Trump's lawyers to prepare a formal appeal with the court against a lower court's decision.
The subpoena stems from the committees' investigation of Russian money laundering and potential U.S. influence, and this is one of three similar cases facing the Supreme Court.
Last month, the House oversight committee and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance both petitioned the Supreme Court to deny Trump a stay against their subpoena forcing his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, to hand over years of personal and business financial records.
Vance and the oversight committee requested the financial records are part of their investigations into hush money Trump allegedly paid to an adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal to keep their affairs secret.
Both Letter and Vance told the Supreme Court that the harm the stay would cause Congress and the public is greater than the harm inflicted by enforcing the subpoenas.
"Any harm applicants will suffer would be 'vastly less severe' than the harm in depriving the peoples' representatives of information they need to secure the nation's 2020 elections from foreign influence and otherwise exercise their constitutional responsibilities wisely before their time for doing so expires," Letter wrote. "Accordingly, the stay request should be denied."
Letter also argued that the court should reject his stay as the president is not entitled to send decisions he disagrees with to the Supreme Court.
"It cannot be the case that the president has the right to stall any congressional subpoena to which he objects through the months or years that it takes for a challenge to work its way through the lower courts..." Letter said. "If that were true, the House -- which has only a two-year term -- would be severely constrained in its ability to conduct oversight or to collect information relating to the Executive Branch."
