The Manhattan district attorney’s office environment accused President Trump on Thursday of purposely dragging out a court battle more than a subpoena seeking 8 a long time of his tax returns in an attempt to correctly defend himself from criminal investigation.

Carey R. Dunne, a attorney for the prosecutor’s business, advised a federal choose that the longer the president disputes the subpoena, the better the probability that the statute of limitations would expire for any doable crime that might have been committed.

The office environment is looking for the president’s personal tax returns and these of his relatives business, the Trump Firm, as portion of an investigation into hush-money payments manufactured in the operate-up to the 2016 election. The president has been battling the subpoena for almost a year.

“What the president’s legal professionals are in search of listed here is delay,” Mr. Dunne said. “I assume which is the overall technique here.”

He extra: “Let’s not let delay eliminate this situation.”

The prosecutor’s assertion came for the duration of a virtual court hearing held prior to the federal decide, Victor Marrero, in Manhattan. Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not respond right to the accusation in court and did not answer to requests for remark.

The district lawyer, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, issued the subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting business, Mazars United states, in August.

Mr. Trump in the beginning fought the subpoena last 12 months with a daring and untested argument: that a sitting president was immune from a state legal investigation. Decide Marrero oversaw that circumstance and ruled from the president, and his selection was upheld by an appeals court.

The circumstance went to the Supreme Court, which final 7 days also rejected the president’s argument. Still, the significant court left open the risk that Mr. Trump could raise new objections to the subpoena.

The circumstance was despatched again to Choose Marrero, who termed for the listening to this 7 days so that both of those sides could define their positions.

At the listening to, a attorney for the president, William S. Consovoy, made it obvious that Mr. Trump was probably to elevate difficulties to the scope of the subpoena, which Mr. Consovoy characterised as “widely overbroad,” and to increase the issue of irrespective of whether there was a political enthusiasm in issuing it.

Immediately after the Supreme Court docket ruling was handed down past 7 days, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, known as the subpoena “frivolous and politically determined.”

Mr. Consovoy also claimed the president should be in a position to find out more about the district attorney’s investigation, which mainly has been saved key, and that it was unfair for him to have to challenge a subpoena devoid of obtaining entry to “at least some info about its mother nature and scope.”

At the hearing, Judge Marrero mentioned that in his ruling very last year rejecting the president’s claim of immunity, he also discovered that the district attorney was not acting in negative religion.

In arguing that the delay could avoid a grand jury from contemplating proof in advance of any statutes of constraints ran out, Mr. Dunne explained that the president was correctly receiving the immunity from prison inquiry that the Supreme Court docket denied him. Other individuals and entities could also escape scrutiny, Mr. Dunne claimed, with no elaboration.

Mr. Trump’s attorneys have to define their new objections to the subpoena by July 27, and Mr. Vance can then reply.

Mr. Vance has been looking into hush-money payments that Michael D. Cohen, the president’s law firm and previous fixer, manufactured in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, an grownup movie actress who reported she had an affair with Mr. Trump. The president has denied an affair.