Mehta will oversee the standoff between the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee and President Donald Trump. The committee has subpoenaed Trump’s long-standing accounting firm Mazars USA for several years’ worth of the President’s financial statements, and the President has sued the committee and Mazars to block the firm from complying.
The judge will weigh the issues of the case next week, according to an order issued Thursday — a ramped-up schedule compared with the original multi-stage timetable, which could have dragged out the legal fight and kept the records from Congress.
President Barack Obama nominated Mehta to the US District Court for the District of Columbia in 2014, after he had worked mainly for the boutique DC law firm Zuckerman Spaeder LLP since 1999. He focused on criminal prosecutions and investigations, representing a slew of high-profile clients including former International Monetary Fund President Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former Republican Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida and a lawyer involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation.
The National Law Journal’s Minority 40 Under 40 list honored Mehta in 2011 and Benchmark Litigation named him a “Future Star” for 2011 and 2012. He served as a staff attorney for the District of Columbia Public Defender Service from 2002 to 2007.
He also previously worked for the law firm Latham & Watkins LLP and clerked for Judge Susan Graber of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, according to his DC District Court biography. He graduated from Georgetown University and the University of Virginia School of Law, and was born in India in 1971.
Mehta has revealed at least one personal detail about himself in his rulings: his love of hip-hop.
The judge heard musician Robert Prunty’s case alleging that several music and entertainment companies had infringed his copyright, including that rapper Common’s song “Kingdom” stole from Prunty’s song “Keys to the Kingdom.” In a 2015 opinion, Mehta asserted that he was “capable of concluding as a matter of law, without the assistance of expert testimony, that the songs ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ and ‘Kingdom’ are not substantially similar.”
“This court also does not consider itself an ordinary ‘lay person’ when it comes to hip-hop music and lyrics,” Mehta added in a corresponding footnote. “The court has listened to hip hop for decades and considers among his favorite musical artists, perhaps a sign of his age, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Drake, and Eminem.”
CNN’s Ariane de Vogue and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.
Source : CNN
