Who is Amit Mehta, a judge overseeing the deadlock on Trump's financial records?



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Mehta will oversee the showdown between the Democrats-led House Watch Committee and President Donald Trump. The committee summoned the Trump accounting firm, Mazars USA, for several years of the president's financial statements, and the president sued the committee and Mazars to prevent the firm from complying.
The judge will review the issues in dispute next week, according to an order issued Thursday – a timeline strengthened from the initial multi-step schedule, which could have delayed the legal battle and kept the Congress archives.
President Barack Obama appointed Mehta to the US District Court of the District of Columbia in 2014, having worked primarily for the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder LLP since 1999. He focused on criminal prosecution and the surveys, which represents Among its clients, former President of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former Republican Representative Tom Feeney of Florida and a lawyer involved in the dispute over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The Minority 40 Under 40 list of the National Law Journal honored Mehta in 2011 and Benchmark Litigation named it "Future Star" for 2011 and 2012. He was a lawyer at the Columbia District Public Defense Service of 2002 to 2007.
He previously worked for the Latham & Watkins LLP law firm and worked for Judge Susan Graber of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the US, according to her biography of the DC District Court. A graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Virginia Law School, he was born in India in 1971.

Mehta revealed at least one personal detail about himself in his decisions: his love of hip-hop.

The judge heard the case of the musician Robert Prunty, alleging that several music and entertainment companies had violated his copyright, including the song "Kingdom" of rapper Common, stolen to the song "Keys to the Kingdom "Prunty. In an opinion rendered in 2015, Mehta asserted that he was "able to legally conclude, without the assistance of an expert, that the songs" Keys to the Kingdom "and" Kingdom "are only not fundamentally similar ".

"This court also does not consider itself a mere" layman "with regard to music and hip-hop lyrics," Mehta added in a corresponding footnote. "The court has listened to hip-hop for decades and considers among its favorite musical artists, perhaps a sign of its age, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Drake and Eminem."

Vogue's Ariane and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.

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