district attorney and Mazars in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to block the subpoena arguing that a sitting president enjoys "absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind." Prosecutors countered that Trump had "sweeping immunity" from a criminal probe while he was in office and that Trump was "seeking to invent and enforce a new presidential 'tax return privilege,' on the theory that disclosing information in a tax return will necessarily reveal information that will somehow impede the functioning of a President, sufficiently to meet the test of irreparable harm." The District Court dismissed the case on the basis of Younger v. Harris (1971), which had stated federal courts should abstain in the matters of tort claims being brought by the person who was prosecuted by those claims. As such, the District Court ordered Trump to comply with the subpoena, pending a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Second Circuit The Second Circuit panel ruled unanimously against Trump in November 2019. The decision stated that the president is not immune from "the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce non-privileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the President" and that a state grand jury may issue subpoenas "in aid of its investigation of potential crimes committed by persons within its jurisdiction, even if that investigation may in some way implicate the President." Supreme Court Trump petitioned to the US Supreme Court on the Second Circuit's ruling to the New York district attorney subpoena as well as in the separate cases related to the House Committee subpoenas. The Supreme Court certified all three cases in December 2019 by consolidating the two House Committee cases into Trump v. Mazars and handling the New York case under Trump v. Vance separately. Oral arguments were held on May 12, 2020, alongside the Trump v. Mazars arguments, both as part of the set of cases held through teleconference because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Observers recognized that the Justices treated Vance, which involved a subpoena related to a grand jury criminal investigation, and Mazars, involving subpoenas related to a Congressional investigation, very differently and expected there to be different results between the cases, with Vance likely to favor the release of the tax records. Justices also spoke of possibly sending both cases to the lower