we will hear argument in donald trump versus committee on financial services may please the court patrick's progress on behalf of president trump his family and the other plaintiffs palance in this case there's no doubt this dispute comes to the court involving the house of representatives on one side and the president and his family members and related businesses on the others bearing obvious weight and importance but the actual question that it's the president and his in capacity and not his official is the complaints so certainly the president the president is standing here before the court in his individual capacity that's what your complaints and that is what the complaint says and that is that is the role we have of the plaintiff on the other hand i do want to note that the number of the motive really arises about concerns that the house or the congress has taken one action and we think that they're not they're not taking the action that you can delineate from their statements from the authorizing resolutions or from the states  and self there's something else completely going on here you can't inquire into a secret motive in that sense but mcgrane many of the cases make it very clear that you can inquire into what the real object is what the legislative purpose is and that the real object as distinguished from no other other words they put something up as one just a shame you know i think i think the court and walk ins is very clear about this although it's a delicate inquiry the court is obligated to look carefully especially overturns here particularly when these subpoenas are obviously targeting the president because of his role as president powers if these proceedings against these individuals well remember i mean technically the proceeding here is against the banks and so there's i think your point and i agree with this is that that really doesn't matter because it's still the president that is correct i think when you look at when you look at some of the comments in particular we cite both in our complaint in our briefings some of the comments that that the chairs of the committee have made for example i mean these specifically are talking about the need to investigate and expose whether or not the president has ties to russia and whether there's pouring leverage over the president chairman of water share with waters has specifically said that she's going to find out where the president's money is coming from i don't think you can look at the face of the subpoenas and conclude that this is some kind of broad you know you know investigation into anybody who has some significant legal state investment or money laundering practices the st request in both of these subpoenas is for the pla to bring transparency to enforce the laws to prevent people from bypassing the laws we think that's an articulation of a law enforcement objective particularly when you actually look at the face of the subpoena and looking inquiry to see what it is that th in well the court is certainly certainly at the highest possible level no one doubts that the financial services committee has a legislative interest in ensuring that the banking laws are proper and updated as they need to be but that it does not follow from that proposition that at the highest level of generality they have an interest in passing those sort of laws or considering passage of the sort of laws that the requests here are pertinent to that that to that that purpose and when you actually see that the requests are so far afield from that a legit purpose i think you c pertinent to the identified purpose i would suggest that one thing one could imagine a far narrower subpoena in some ways narrow with respect to it targets the targets but also a broader subpoena looking beyond that one particular  house resolution and the and the justification for the financial services subpoena has alleged that it's particular concerned about the lack of disclosure in a real estate investments in the real estate market the threat of foreign purchasers and money laundering in the real estate market but the requests on their face have are not in any way shape or form limited to transactions with foreign folks than transactions with a legit shell companies transactions in the real estate market they're seeking with respect to every single named plaintiffs as well as any of their agents or employees or anybody who's connected to these entities every single account record at these banks every debit card swipe every check that was written every account report every communication relating to any of  yes that is correct is not a basis for four questions of itself the problem here of course is that the real object of the subpoena and the department of justice which i think understandable that about criminal investigation agrees with us the real object does appear to be law enforcement to the committees do not have an anything more than what is required by the way these requests if you are in the usa as office and you are drawing up a document them and to try to launch a law enforcement investigation i can't imagine a single category of documents from either of these banks that isn't covered by the of give me the following information about people whose transactions reach this level which is high level information specific information that would be systemwide the only reason why they have focused on these particular plaintiffs and why the subpoenas make these within the bank corrected and it's an institutional interest i don't understand why the debit cards of the president's children and grandchildren in some cases have anything to do with in that way with the investigation that will support legislation or evidence as to why that is not the real object and at least the minimum it's it's far over broad and the reason that you know that is because it is not i think a good contrast to this both in terms of the substance of the inquiry as well as the actual procedure that was followed below it was  here is the is the bean case from the front from b b c that was the same committee basically investigating the same subject matter and there's a subpoena to a financial institution for customers documents in two different district courts and if i may just problems recognize the difficulties encourage in fact mandated that the parties sit down and try to negotiate what they really actually need and went through two rounds of negotiation alternately when the subpoena came up to the court for in a forstmann and i'll just note that when it came to the co it was focused on two years that happened to actually be around the election not ten years like the duration subpoena is that far predates any concern about the two thousand and sixteen election it was focused on a specific number of transactions involving some specific limited properties or part counter parties not every transaction that you've had for the last ten years not every transaction regardless of amount that's the kind of narrowing that's the kind of person inquiry that then led the court in that case to say now that we are here this satisfies a legitimate legislative purpose and i'm not going to do any further line by line analysis as to the eighty three transactions we have narrowed this thing down to we're not anywhere close to the kind of focused inquiry that the intelligence committee had in that case and i'd not seek bank wide information about a particular category of people i think that the statements that we identified where they specifically say chairman schiff specifically says we're here to determine whether or not there's leverage over president trump and whether or not that to determine in the real estate sector in which the plaintiffs in this case are only one of the many many parties when gauging these types of transactions this really seems like an attempt to gather information that used to be to legislation or to investigate them i think the department of justice wisely suggest that in these types of cases the president and his family should probably be the last place that the house goes to for that type of general concern about law enforcement and disclosures rather than the st person you start with as a discretionary examples for example the bergen case where from new york where it was a private party and the risk ill determination made in that case that some of these requests are pertinent and some of these requests are the pertinent district court refused to even consider doing that kind of analysis  what happened in being which again did not involve a request to the executive branch agency but just to a private parties banking records still ordered the parties to negotiate on two different grounds and so this in this court clearly sort of banking records financial transactions the precise type of records out here i'm sorry official or unofficial graham those were all private records that that the fusion diffusion of the fusion g p s case that involved private parties financial transactions avoid unnecessary decisions of the constitutional dimension which is true whether or not this formally involves the executive or not and and the tried and true method of doing that in some cases has been to push the parties to try to at least narrow the dispute that's what the court did in told in what the there are no limits anybody can be declared a case study as long as we have some topic under which article one gives us some of the forty two dollars an act the courts are powerless to do anything to protect the recipients even if we limited in our analysis to  example in the majors case there was an opportunity given to supplement the record upon which we took advantage of it may be somewhat limited in terms of the categories of information that we can supplement with but it's not nonexistent i also think that with respect to the  not only do they have to clearly identify the legitimate legislative purpose the court needs to be careful to make sure that the legislative purpose that has been announced is in fact or at least their requests are pertinent to that legislative purpose and that they are truly necessary when you're talking about about an attempt to basically target and no doubt this track to legislate that that exactly after the fact announce a legislative purpose that also encompasses what the requests are aimed at a legislative purpose and now i think that there's a  wavering forfeiture just like any other just like any other party in this case i mean certainly we haven't briefed we haven't argued we haven't had the chance to present any evidence with respect to any other purposes other than the ones they've stated on the record supr what you mean by disregard having having asserted a legitimate legislative purpose and cases are all clear on this including walk ins you still have to demonstrate the pertinence of the request the supreme court has has made that crystal clear and then walk into this is if we talk about the need to demonstrate enact and we explained i thinking in great detail why the language of the act and other textual provisions and the history particular the timing of various judicial decisions needs to be is capable conclusion that it is not limited to i remember when i was writing down that argument the difficulty of wading through all seven hundred and fifty pages of the attachment to that legislative markup to find where the exact one line is and then i fortunately remember that there's a provision of law cited in our brief that basically says courts should not in there was no need to to put a redundancy in the statute and let me explain why that is at the time of this enactment the precise language that was used here have been upheld for nearly three decades as covering congress as any agency apart language you can help to to cover congress that was what the background in law against which the congress was legislating at the time was moreover as contains a number of explicit exemptions one of those explicit exemptions is for the g a o i don't understand why you would records records that a committee requests from a supervisory an agency if the average v a didn't apply to any congressional committee request why would you need a special exemption for these types of records request or only from these types of government authorities that doesn't make any sense that are thank you your honors and good morning douglas letter on the general counsel of the u s house of representatives with me today is ms jennifer reid from the financial services committee mr daniel noble from the house intelligence committee  i want to address obviously any questions this court has i took copious notes when my friend mr strobridge was arguing and i got answers to every single thing he said the main thing i want to ur the supreme court's decision in the green where the court unanimously rejected a very large percentage of the arguments that mr shaw there's making today and in fact it did so overruling a lower court that accepted many of those arguments so please understand the supreme court long ago unanimously rejected almost everything that mr straw bridge is saying today and so really what this means is mr strawbridge is asking you as a court of appeals to go against a massive amount of supreme court precedents some of which separation of individual capacity it's very interesting to think of this as a separation of powers problem when mr trump himself represented by his own private lawyers is the plaintiffs here president the president  willing to lend under these circumstances and should there be more legislation should there be better regulation so that this doesn't happen and it fits in with another question that was asked  a whole batch of banks that have absolutely nothing absolutely nothing to do with mr trump or his family this  subpoena here lists other banks and it lists for instance russian oligarchs were doing the financial services committee and i'll get to intel a moment because we don't want to forget that financial services committee is doing a very large industry wide investigation because as house resolutions provide we think there may be a very strong need for more regulation because russia this and i've asked the case if the answer is yes ok thank you and if it's accurate to be honest with your honor i would have to take probably some moments to look closely at the wording i've asked my colleagues to do that may i may i get back to you with the end of the argument and answer that would that be all right your are all right thank you thank you i think your honor said you had several questions  covers it would that check and then if if deutsche bank said to the committee we have some checks  that involve a gardner in mr trump's employee and really don't seem to have anything to do anything except his personal health problems can we exclude that that's exactly the kind of thing that that the financial services committee talks to people about when when when there are these kinds of investigations you're asking the firm doesn't have any safety valve at all for that type of show and a said though our practices we certainly are willing and we do take i've met with the committee staffers it's a kind of thing that they do so if mr trump wants to say you're right this  valid i've got some minor parts of it some very very minor parts of it that really don't have anything to do with whether or not i'm laundering money for russian oligarchs could we exclude those we would be what you're asking us to do we would just be relying on the committees are willing to make some accommodation absolutely except let me say this if your concern is what i've just said the subpoenas are obviously valid but we're concerned that there are some tiny percentage that have nothing to do with mr trump and his family and these other businesses have nothing to do with their real financial activities we will direct the bank not to produce we would have absolutely no problem with that it's not necessary but if that is really the court's concern we can take care of that in an instant we just we don't have any trouble with that the problem they will or will not be made public available publicly available the financial services committee doesn't have the same rules but in general again we will happy to listen to arguments about why things these types of massive loans that we're talking about remember that dodge bank i think ultimately was a lending mr trump in this very center prizes i think it's about two billion dollars my understanding is in that kind of situation it would i will be happy to check and get back to the court on whether whether and how we have complied with six hundred and thirteen no mr trump has not raised any issue along these lines in this case but i'll be happy to  i'll be happy to check into that specific question and give you a fuller answer because nothing was what i'm saying to you is i'm giving an excuse for myself since they have not raised that i am not prepared on that question  of things as we know the supreme court has made clear it's not your function to be going line by line in congressional subpoenas your function is to say is this subpoena in general valid and so that's your some sort of serious and actual negotiation he's given absolutely no indication of willingness to do this when mr strobridge raised this in the district court i said i do not dollars loan requests the banks own and obviously this and obviously that i'm not going to fight about that if this court thinks there should be negotiation i'd like to say the same thing i said to the district court please make it really really fast because we think mr trump's statements make clear this is absolutely insincere and ask mr strobridge again when he gets up what kinds of things are we talking about given that his client  said no nothing let's not waste time with this i really think this is a red herring but fine give us a day give us twenty i think twenty minutes would reveal that this is not a sincere offer mr trump and he and the various other people have given no indication whatsoever that they actually would be willing to negotiate over in any way that serious separation of powers this is not that there is no reasonable argument that if deutsche bank turns over materials a member deutsche bank has all sorts of burdens on it but dodgy bank has never said to us we can't comply because there's just a lot of materials that's not what deutsche bank is saying mr trump is being called upon to do virtually nothing for private records that are non privileged that he turned over to a private to private business organizations and remember the supreme court in miller has said these are not privileged and indeed it's quite interesting at one the proper way to do this is subpoena me so that it will disrupt my presidency and that's a very strange suggestion and i think shows the insincerity of all of this now as you said you can't cite a precedent for a subpoenas of the sort before so that makes me think well i should seriously consider the justice department's argument about separation of powers concerns i realize it's a rd party subpoena to a bank seeking private information not official records and i realize they're not going to take the president's time to go through the torture banks working compiling the documents but that this is the st incident of some of subpoena like this and in that context the justice department says well you should consider you have an obligation to make sure there is a legitimate legislative purpose articulated with a sufficient degree of particular it's a little unusual to to do a case study i know i'm mischaracterizing partly the argument that a case study into whether a banks are complying with an time money laundering statute there are again that get this is only mr trump is absolutely false that it's a law second mr there is already substantial information out there because of mr trump and plenty of this started before about that there are all sorts of suspicious things going on that bank will touch mr trump and yet decision and that's what we would urge you to do as far as the standard the actual standard view i'm not criticizing but this court has not necessarily been consistent  some times you've said in these circumstances reasonable likelihood of success i think other times you've said serious question i frankly having read the case i'm not positive which one applies we think   what about the clear statement everybody knows it's clear if president trump had decided to comply with the subpoenas he can do that the justice department can say you know make the senate investigation invalid in the supreme court clear on that and in fact one of the things the supreme court relied on in ruling that these kinds of investigations are totally proper pointed out there was a major to figure out if mr trump is under the influence of the russians so let's just look at the last two years a financial dealings that would make no sense whatsoever obviously we need to challenge how come they want domestic financial transactions and obviously if you're laundering russian money moving into the united states you need to see how is it being invested domestically so this is a as i said major investigation of a whole industry that the financial services committee doing and a major investigation by the intelligence committee about possible highly dangerous foreign influence over the highest levels of the united states government he would probably be criminal if these committees were just going to do tiny look at tiny little not involve individuals and entities in paragraph one so i think that was paragraph seven and eight references individuals and entities in paragraph want to correct that's what that's what i'm told  then and remember we are dealing with somebody who has claims vast wealth so it's not like we're dealing with somebody who would just be involved in eleven transaction  in congress if necessary yes now here that's not at all what happened pages i think it's about three through ten of our of our brief we give all sorts of explanations quotes from chairwoman waters and chairman schiff about what they're doing and why we refer to some house resolutions etc if what mr sharp were just talking about this is the resolution that ratified well of course that came after because were ratifying it to show this clear statement argument is silly to begin with but fine we'll play your game and we met it one question right on that point the there's reliance i think in your papers on the committee the intelligence committee's report to the oversight committee which identifies several purposes of the intelligence committee when they read very narrowly i think both agreeing and if i recall correctly baron blat say that mr straw complaining about grandchildren i don't think that the subpoenas talk about immediate family i don't believe that is ever said anything about grandchildren if it did that would be perfectly valid they're all money laundering and hiding assets of people who are doing it family members unwittingly plenty of times to hide things carrying out law enforcement and that's invalid because congress can't do law enforcement i agree congress can to law enforcement then why just a couple years after the supreme court said that congress has the power to get financial records why two or three years later when congress passed a statute that says you can get government you can get records if it's part of a law statute to say that congress meant to exclude itself and congress would have been providing for punitive damages against itself because the statute allows for that again it's very  broader than the constitutional definition certainly broader than the constitutional definition that my colleague is urging so that's that's a red herring i think on that but i want to dress with a more fundamental points that mr leonard made when he was up here let me start with his  suggestion i guess that we're being insincere or somehow that we're not actually negotiate in good faith i mean i made that when mr so letter is absolutely right i went down to the house of representatives i was shown an unreactive copy of that subpoena at the same i never heard anything back i made the record i made the offer on the record twice in front of a district court which is a statement that i take seriously and that i consider myself bound by and we made it numerous times in our brief to this court so i don't think there's any basis to determine that we're being insincere and i certainly welcome i think we've made clear in this case back down for you do surely refereed negotiations on whatever time line the court thinks is appropriate is absolutely something we are willing to participate in in good faith with respect to mr letters assertion that mcgrane overruled all of our arguments i can only read to this court specific lines from the grain that refute that the grain specifically says i'm quoting from the decision the only legitimate object the senate could have in ordering the investigation was to eat it in legislating and jim it legislative purpose it's physically says that when determining whether there's a legitimate legislative purpose for  s you can look at the face of the request as well as the statement of the authorizing committee and its pacifically notes that if an inadmissible or unlawful object were affirmatively and definitely a valid then there may be grounds to question whether or not th is legitimate and it's pacifically citing kilborne says it witness rightfully may refuse to answer where the balance of the power are exceeded where the questions are not pertinent to the matter under inquiry that is very much every aspect of the arguments that we have asserted here mcgrane did not overrule any aspect of the of the arguments that we're making here walking's which comes much more recently is even more specific on this point walk ins first of all raises the point that the court cannot simply assume that every congressional investigation is justified by a public need that overrides any private rights affected it's basically identifies three aspects of a congressional inquiry that should give a court pause when trying to determine whether the congressional here run afoul of all three of those guardrails identified by watkins i think it's important to understand that we're not the one who called this a case study but that's that's th represented referring to to the target of this particular subpoena being a case study if they have identified any other case studies on the domestic side of any banking transactions i have missed that in the record the capital one subpoena is obviously only targeted at the plaintiffs in this case so i don't think that this court should should simply accept the notion that case study is somehow a lie or fictitious where is the evidence that there are other people who are of comparable involvement in the real estate industry or in the money laundering field whose records have been targeted at the specificity of these subpoenas have they have the subpoenas we don't they have not provided them to us or to the court and the court can draw some conclusions from that  the i do want to thank mr letter for making the point more clearly than i ever could have he's absolutely right i've never been mrs u s attorney i don't work at the department of justice for forty years i would have the st idea how to go about investigating a money laundering operation but that's not anything his client can do that is specifically what his client is forbidden from doing and you only have to look at the face of the subpoena to understand exactly what they're trying to do the problem here is not only that the request might issue a check written to pay for the medical bills of an employee the trump organization the subpoenas as drafted here look for every single debit card every diet coke that a teenager bought using a credit card from capital one every single payment of any medical expenses or child care expenses is there any reason why the committee has to explain it does include grandchildren because the definition the door shipping subpoena reaches immediate family members and because subpoena lists individuals who they want these records for some of those individuals or the president's children it also demands the records of the of all of the individuals immediate family members which is defined to include spouses and children so when you ask for the records money laundering is working and made a compelling case that they were not targeting the trump family and trying to reconstruct their entire financial history they made those decisions they drafted the subpoena to cover what it does they're the ones up here standing that we would we would not have any objection to it if we just understood how money laundering investigations work and how you have to track down family and trace every single branch i can't imagine a clear example of the improper purpose here and the fact that this is what enforcement again com court and this gets to the standard of review question that i was asked we do think that this is up there in the preliminary injunction and we think that the serious question standard is right that would support issuing a preliminary injunction or remand in the case down for actual negotiations traditionally walk in to walk through specifically what the nature of the inquiry is ignore acknowledges that it's delicate but still imposes on courts the obligation to do it and again i don't really do to think that there is an opportunity here to at least narrow some of those requests the statutory argument would accomplish some of that but also there's an opportunity to follow the path that was laid for it in both in demanding a level of fit between the asserted purpose and the substance of the requests as well as ensuring that the parties have done everything they can to prevent the court from having to wade into an area fraught with constitutional and novel difficulty putting us to lay out guidelines for how the d c circuit the d c circuit did so i don't think it's necessary i think that a rd party to help mediate that dispute that's the word that's what i was referring to with respect to that that i think they did it twice they sent back down one with very general parameters along with far more specific parameters as to what should be done i think we've just got a few questions for you judge newman does  you we be happy well we need to know because there's a separate statute on disclosure of returns if you don't have them we don't have to worry about it if you do have them we have to worry about so it's a fairly important question in this case understood your honor and given the relevant contractual obligations in the statute which i just mentioned i don't think i'm in a position to address that here in an open courtroom today we'd be happy to continue that seal an answer to the question of whether you have the returns and that's something that we would of course be happy to explore explore or explore and do  colleague i mean it seems to me we're exploring it right now yes we are i'm the court we don't have a reporter to read back would you within forty eight hours i'll put it this way provide us a letter please indicating whether you do or do not have what your client does or does not have and this is to both of you also asserting the same position does or does not have tax returns that would be produced in response to the subpoena if it were enforced as it is now articulated yes we will we will provide the court with the letter and also on the specific statutory  prohibitions that we feel may be a pleasurable to the extent there are a lot of capital we'd be happy to provide that whether in forty eight hours what would you like to answer the question i mean you're not deutsche bank so you could you could during that interval did your bank begin the process of collecting documents responsive to your honor collection has been ongoing and as the relevant chairs of both half i really can't put a percentage on that you could be a rough estimate of the time it would take to complete compliance of compliance were not so that will of course depend on the court's ruling on whether to uphold the