and yes, Nixon was subpoenaed for those tapes... successfully.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/22/can-the-president-be-indicted-or-subpoenaed/?utm_term=.0a264e3a5a12
The first case in which this came up was Aaron Burr’s treason trial. Marshall, sitting as a trial judge in 1807, “at first concluded that since the President is the first magistrate of the United States, and not a King who can do no wrong, he was subject to the judicial subpoena power,” according to the OLC memo.
This particular subpoena went to President Thomas Jefferson, compelling him to testify in court in Richmond. Jefferson decided not to go, claiming he was too busy running the government, but he submitted documents and offered to give testimony in Washington. And that was that.
Months later, Marshall seemed to revise his thinking and said courts were not “required to proceed against the President as against an ordinary individual.” In an 1838 decision, Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes, the Supreme Court took an even narrower view of the judiciary’s power concerning the president, according to the OLC memo.
“The executive power is vested in a president; and so far as his powers are derived from the constitution, he is beyond the reach of any other department, except in the mode prescribed by the constitution through the impeachment,” the court said.
Fast-forward 167 years to U.S. v. Nixon, the landmark Supreme Court case from 1974. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote for the court that Nixon, still in office amid the Watergate scandal, had to comply with a subpoena seeking records and tapes of the president talking to aides and advisers. These records were to be reviewed in private by a federal judge, the court said.
“To read the Art. II powers of the President as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforcement of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary and nondiplomatic discussions would upset the constitutional balance of ‘a workable government’ and gravely impair the role of the courts under Art. III,” Burger wrote.
Burger addressed Marshall’s statement 167 years earlier that courts were not “required to proceed against the president as against an ordinary individual.”
“Marshall’s statement cannot be read to mean in any sense that a President is above the law,” Burger wrote, “but relates to the singularly unique role under Art. II of a President’s communications and activities, related to the performance of duties under that Article.”
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You can't run from Federal Service of Process....eventually, we get you.
