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FOCUS: Jane Mayer | Why Does New York's Criminal Investigation of Donald Trump Appear All But Over?
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
Mayer writes: "After promising to prioritize the case, the new Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, seems to have abandoned it."

After promising to prioritize the case, the new Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, seems to have abandoned it.

The criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in his home town appears to be all but officially over, at least for now. In an unexpected reversal of roles, Alvin Bragg, who took over as Manhattan’s District Attorney, in January, after campaigning on a promise to hold the former President accountable, instead seems to have all but abandoned the case that was brought by his predecessor Cyrus Vance, Jr., a prosecutor often criticized for being too timid.

Before finishing out his third term as Manhattan D.A., Vance’s office successfully took its case against Trump to the Supreme Court twice. His office then indicted both Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and his former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, on tax charges. Prosecutors under Vance were reportedly focussing on whether Trump had criminally manipulated sworn statements of his net worth to mislead banks into giving him favorable loans, and government authorities into falsely reducing his taxes.

The former President has denied the allegations, and accused the Manhattan D.A.’s office of conducting a political witch hunt. But there were signs that investigators were making headway. This month, Mazars U.S.A., the accounting firm that had long handled Trump’s business, essentially fired him as a client, saying that it couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of nine years’ worth of Trump’s financial statements. A second grand jury was empanelled last November to hear the prosecutor’s developing case against Trump, and its term does not expire until April.

On Wednesday, the Times reported that the two most prominent prosecutors overseeing the case had unceremoniously quit. Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz submitted their resignations after Bragg signalled that he lacked confidence in the historic case. During his campaign last year, and in the weeks before taking office, Bragg had, in contrast, signalled that he would personally review the probe and expressed gratitude for the work of the two veteran prosecutors. “This is obviously a consequential case, one that merits the attention of the DA personally,” he told CNN, in December. “I can say that you’ve got two very good lawyers that have been looking at it for a while. I think it would be a disservice to Manhattan to lose them.”

Dunne and Pomerantz, both of whom had high-profile legal careers in private practice prior to working on the Manhattan D.A.’s investigation, differed with Bragg and wanted to continue pressing the case, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. They became frustrated, though, with what they regarded as Bragg’s lack of support for the probe. The source suggested that career prosecutors in the office’s Investigation Division had questioned the strength of the case as well.

In the past, career prosecutors in the Manhattan D.A.’s office have stood in the way of other risky cases, including the first potential prosecution of Harvey Weinstein on sexual-assault charges. Vance’s office eventually convicted Weinstein, but it was years after a victim had filed a police report. An individual with ties to the D.A.’s office, who asked not to be named, said that Bragg’s decision raised questions about whether he will prove forceful enough to overcome the institutional inertia in the office. “These two guys who resigned today are pros,” the source said, referring to Dunne and Pomerantz. “I was told that they simply felt that Bragg was not going to engage, and they needed the D.A. to be engaged to be able to proceed toward taking action.” Bragg, the source added, had given the prosecutors the impression that he was distracted and disengaged, often checking his phone during meetings about the case. (A spokesperson for the D.A. said that both claims are untrue.) The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Bragg was slow to meet with Dunne and Pomerantz after taking office. When Bragg did meet the two prosecutors, he didn’t seem deeply interested in the probe.

A spokesperson for Bragg told the Times that the investigation would continue without the two prosecutors, and that the D.A. was “grateful for their service.” But the source with knowledge of the probe said that, though Bragg might say it is ongoing, activity in the case has stopped. In essence, Bragg reversed a go decision. So far, his reasoning remains opaque.

The case was always a high-wire act. Unlike the parallel civil case under investigation by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, which only needs to reach a threshold of “preponderance of the evidence” to find Trump liable for violating the law, the D.A.’s criminal case would have had to convince a jury “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump had criminal intent to defraud. Real-estate valuations of the kind that Trump was under investigation for manipulating are also often slippery, but Vance’s team had hoped to prove that Trump engaged in a decades-long pattern of criminal fraud. Dunne, in particular, spent years on the investigation, and, although he and Pomerantz apparently never thought the case would be easy, they both believed that it had merit.

Trump, meanwhile, has denounced the prosecutors investigating him, which includes both Bragg and James, who are Black, as “racists.” He also faces criminal investigations outside of Manhattan, including one in Fulton County, Georgia, where judges approved a request from the local district attorney to convene a grand jury to weigh charges against Trump resulting from his alleged attempt to pressure officials into reversing his loss in the state’s 2020 Presidential election. While Manhattan may be pulling the plug on prosecuting Trump’s business, the D.A.’s office in suburban Westchester County has opened a separate criminal investigation into his business activities there. As the Times reported, the Westchester district attorney is investigating the finances of the Trump National Golf Club in the county.

Michael Cohen, a former attorney and close confidant of the ex-President who pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance laws on Trump’s behalf, said a decision not to indict would be “a dereliction of duty to all New Yorkers and the country.” Cohen added that he had expected to testify against his former boss before the grand jury himself: “I know the information in the NYDA’s possession,” he said.

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Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Charges expected Thursday for Trump's company, top executive

APNEWS.COM

Charges expected Thursday for Trump's company, top executive

Donald Trump’s company and his longtime finance chief are expected to be charged Thursday with tax-related crimes stemming from a New York investigation into the former president’s business dealings, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

The charges against the Trump Organization and the company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, appear to involve non-monetary benefits the company gave to top executives, possibly including use of apartments, cars and school tuition.

The people were not authorized to speak about an ongoing investigation and did so on condition of anonymity. The Wall Street Journal was first to report that charges were expected Thursday.

The charges against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization would be first criminal cases to arise from the two-year probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat who leaves office at the end of the year.

Prosecutors have been scrutinizing Trump’s tax records, subpoenaing documents and interviewing witnesses, including Trump insiders and company executives.

A grand jury was recently empaneled to weigh evidence and New York Attorney General Letitia James said she was assigning two of her lawyers to work with Vance on the criminal probe while she continues a civil investigation of Trump.

Messages seeking comment were left with a spokesperson and lawyers for the Trump Organization. Weisselberg’s lawyer, Mary Mulligan, declined to comment. The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment.

Trump’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Jason Miller, a longtime former senior adviser to the Republican, spun the looming charges as “politically terrible for the Democrats.”

“They told their crazies and their supplicants in the mainstream media this was about President Trump. Instead, their Witch Hunt is persecuting an innocent 80 year-old man for maybe taking free parking!” Miller tweeted, apparently referring to Weisselberg, who is 73.

Trump, who’s been critical of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, was in Texas visiting the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday. He did not respond to shouted questions about the charges as he participated in a briefing with state officials.

Trump had blasted the investigation in a statement Monday, deriding Vance’s office as “rude, nasty, and totally biased” in their treatment of Trump company lawyers, representatives, and long-term employees.

Trump, in the statement, said the company’s actions were “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime” and that Vance’s probe was an investigation was “in search of a crime.”

Trump Organization lawyers met virtually with Manhattan prosecutors last week in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade them from charging the company. Prosecutors gave the lawyers a Monday deadline to make the case that criminal charges shouldn’t be filed.

Ron Fischetti, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told the AP this week that there was no indication Trump himself was included in the first batch of charges.

“There is no indictment coming down this week against the former president,” Fischetti said. “I can’t say he’s out of the woods yet completely.”

Weisselberg, a loyal lieutenant to Trump and his real estate-developer father, Fred, came under scrutiny, in part, because of questions about his son’s use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost.

Barry Weisselberg managed a Trump-operated ice rink in Central Park.

Barry’s ex-wife, Jen Weisselberg, has been cooperating with the investigation and turned over reams of tax records and other documents to investigators.

“We have been working with prosecutors for many months now as part of this tax and financial investigation and have provided a large volume of evidence that allowed them to bring these charges,” Jen Weisselberg’s lawyer, Duncan Levin, said Wednesday. “We are gratified to hear that the DA’s office is moving forward with a criminal case.”

Allen Weisselberg has worked for the Trump Organization since 1973. The case against him could give prosecutors the means to pressure the executive into cooperating and telling them what he knows about Trump’s business dealings.

Prosecutors subpoenaed another long-time Trump finance executive, senior vice president and controller Jeffrey McConney, to testify in front of the grand jury in the spring. Under New York law, grand jury witnesses are granted immunity and can not be charged for conduct they testify about.

Prosecutors probing untaxed benefits to Trump executives have also been looking at Matthew Calamari, a former Trump bodyguard turned chief operating officer, and his son, the company’s corporate director of security. However, a lawyer for the Calamaris said Wednesday that he didn’t expect them to be charged.

“Although the DA’s investigation obviously is ongoing, I do not expect charges to be filed against either of my clients at this time,” said the lawyer, Nicholas Gravante.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Weslaco, Texas, and Bernard Condon in New York contributed to this report.

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Monday, May 31, 2021

RSN: FOCUS | Roger Stone: Mr. President, Prepare to Be Indicted

31 May 21

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31 May 21

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FOCUS | Roger Stone: Mr. President, Prepare to Be Indicted

Joshua Zitser, Business Insider
Zitser writes: "Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former advisor to Donald Trump, said in an Infowars interview on Friday that he believed the former president would face an indictment imminently."

oger Stone, a longtime friend and former advisor to Donald Trump, said in an Infowars interview on Friday that he believed the former president would face an indictment imminently, Salon reported.

"I would be shocked if they did not come forward with a fabricated indictment for bank fraud or tax fraud against the former president by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance," Stone told the far-right Infowars.

"If they want to go after the president on fabricated charges, then we will establish that this is a partisan witch hunt," the GOP strategist, whom Trump pardoned last year, told the host Alex Jones.

Stone said, without evidence, that he thought an indictment would likely be filed sometime around the end of the Republican-led election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona.

"Don't be surprised if the announcement comes at the exact time that we learn the truth about Maricopa County, Arizona," he said. "Don't be surprised, because I see that coming."

Stone alleged in the interview that those involved with the Manhattan district attorney's criminal investigation into Trump were "combing for a crime," saying it was "disgraceful."

Vance's office has for years been investigating the Trump Organization's and Trump's finances, court records indicate. Vance recently convened a grand jury, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday. That marked an aggressive new phase in the investigation, Insider's Sonam Sheth and Jacob Shamsian reported.

Legal experts suspect the inquiry is nearing its end, Sheth and Shamsian reported.

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

RSN: FOCUS: Bess Levin | Report: Trump's Inner Circle Is Terrified. To Be Fair, They Probably Should Be.

04 May 21

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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Report: Trump's Inner Circle Is Terrified. To Be Fair, They Probably Should Be.

Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "If you haven't been keeping up with the legal affairs of Donald Trump of late, what you should know is that the guy is very likely f--ked."

To be fair, they probably should be.

f you haven’t been keeping up with the legal affairs of Donald Trump of late, what you should know is that the guy is very likely f--ked. With the ex-president facing no fewer than 29 lawsuits and three criminal investigations, his tax returns are currently in the hands of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., whose team is also working to flip the Trump Organization employee who knows where all the bodies are buried and has both (1) cooperated with prosecutors in the past and (2) made some rather interesting comments about the company’s legal dealings. At the same time Rudy Giuliani had his home and office raided by the feds last week, a turn of events that former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara has said is very, very bad news for the NYC mayor turned Trump lawyer/cautionary tale. All of which reportedly has the rest of the 45th president’s inner circle extremely concerned about their own legal exposure.

CNN reports that the raids on Giuliani’s Madison Avenue apartment and Park Avenue office have “left allies of the former president feeling uneasy about what could come next,” according to sources close to Trump. “This was a show of force that sent a strong message to a lot of people in Trump’s world that other things may be coming down the pipeline,” one adviser told CNN. According to that person, the seizing of Giuliani’s electronic devices has “ignited a sense of fear” inside Trump’s orbit “that Justice Department officials may be more willing to pursue investigations of the 45th president or his inner circle than many Trump allies had previously believed.” The same person opined to CNN that they couldn’t believe “you would need to send seven FBI agents to go and collect a cell phone and laptop,” calling the raid “overkill.”

Of course Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s allies may still be operating under the false sense of security provided by the last administration’s Justice Department, run by Bill Barr, wherein alleged criminals were shielded from consequences thanks to their proximity to the equally shady president. As The New York Times reported last week, political appointees at the DOJ blocked prosecutors from obtaining the Giuliani warrants last summer and again after the election. (They were only granted once Merrick Garland took over, which, as Bharara noted, was a delay that could have accidentally cost Giuliani a Trump pardon.)

And speaking of Trump’s inner circle, last week his former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, claimed that Giuliani would ultimately turn on Trump to save himself. And not just Trump, but the entire family. “There’s no doubt that [Giuliani is] nervous…. And it’s rightfully so that he’s nervous, because he knows the power of the SDNY is unlimited, and they use that power,” Cohen said. Noting that Giuliani presumably “has no interest in going to prison and spending the golden years of his life behind bars,” Cohen said, “Do I think Rudy will give up Donald in a heartbeat? Absolutely. He certainly doesn’t want to follow my path down into a 36-month sentence.” He added: “What’s ironic here is the fact that these tactics of the Southern District of New York, in terms of bullying you into a plea deal, were created by Rudy Giuliani going back 30 years ago. And it’s just ironic that the tactics that he created for that office are now going to be employed against him, in terms of making him plead guilty and, certainly, at the least, turning over information about Jared, Ivanka, about Don Jr., about Donald himself, about all of these individuals in that garbage can orbit of Donald Trump.” A person close to the 45th president concurred that Giuliani would end up cooperating with prosecutors, telling CNN: “Even the most loyal people have their breaking point,” adding that Giuliani flipping “wouldn’t shock me at all.”

In an email to CNN, the former NYC mayor’s attorney said Giuliani “has done nothing wrong” and that the raids demonstrated a “corrupt double standard” by Joe Biden’s DOJ in its treatment of Trump’s associates versus Democrats, seemingly a reference to the fact that Hunter Biden has not been prosecuted for the fictitious crimes Giuliani has claimed the president’s son committed in Ukraine. Not acknowledged by Giuliani, of course, is the other inconvenient fact that many of Trump’s allies are criminals. So, y’know, there’s that.

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Saturday, March 13, 2021

RSN: FOCUS: Jane Mayer | Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump?

12 March 21

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FOCUS: Jane Mayer | Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump?

Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
Mayer writes:

Insiders say that the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation has dramatically intensified since the former President left office. “It’s like night and day,” says one. According to another, “They mean business.”

n February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who, along with two investigators, had driven up from New York City in a heavy snowstorm. Although the exchange didn’t look momentous, it set in motion the next phase of one of the most significant legal showdowns in American history. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for nearly a decade’s worth of private financial records, including his tax returns. The subpoena had been issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, who is leading the first, and larger, of two known probes into potential criminal misconduct by Trump. The second was opened, last month, by a county prosecutor in Georgia, who is investigating Trump’s efforts to undermine that state’s election results.

Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he has been waging a ferocious battle. His subpoena required Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars U.S.A., to turn over millions of pages of personal and corporate records, dating from 2011 to 2019, that Trump had withheld from prosecutors and the public. Before Trump was elected, in 2016, he promised to release his tax records, as every other modern President has done, and he repeated that promise after taking office. Instead, he went to extraordinary lengths to hide the documents. The subpoena will finally give legal authorities a clear look at the former President’s opaque business empire, helping them to determine whether he committed any financial crimes. After Vance’s victory at the Supreme Court, he released a typically buttoned-up statement: “The work continues.”

If the tax records contain major revelations, the public probably won’t learn about them anytime soon: the information will likely be kept secret unless criminal charges are filed. The hard drive—which includes potentially revealing notes showing how Trump and his accountants arrived at their tax numbers—is believed to be locked in a high-security annex in lower Manhattan. A spokesman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to confirm the drive’s whereabouts, but people familiar with the office presume that it has been secured in a radio-frequency-isolation chamber in the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, on Centre Street. The chamber is protected by a double set of metal doors—the kind used in bank vaults—and its walls are lined with what looks like glimmering copper foil, to block remote attempts to tamper with digital evidence. It’s a modern equivalent of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Such extreme precautions are not surprising, given the nature of the case: no previous President has been charged with a criminal offense. If Trump, who remains the Republican Party’s most popular potential Presidential candidate and who recently signalled interest in another run, is charged and convicted, he could end up serving a prison term instead of a second White House term. Vance, the scion of a prominent Democratic family—the kind of insider whom the arriviste Trump has long resented—now has the power to rewrite Trump’s place in history. The journalist Jonathan Alter, a longtime friend of the D.A. and his family, said, “Vance represents everything that Trump, when he was in Queens with his nose pressed up against the glass in Manhattan, wanted to conquer and destroy.”

Vance’s investigation, which appears to be focussed largely on business practices that Trump engaged in before taking office, may seem picayune in comparison with the outrageous offenses to democratic norms that Trump committed as President. But the New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose recent book “Strongmen” examines the characteristics of antidemocratic rulers, told me, “If you don’t prosecute Trump, it sends the message that all that he did was acceptable.” She pointed out that strongmen typically “inhabit a gray zone between illegal and legal for years”; corrupt acts of political power are just an extension of their shady business practices. “Trumpism isn’t just about him,” Ben-Ghiat went on. “It’s a whole way of being in the world. It’s about secrecy, domination, trickery, and fraud.” She said, of Vance’s probe, “It’s symbolic for the public, and very important to give the public a sense of accountability.”

The legal clash between Vance and Trump has already tested the limits of Presidential power. In 2019, Trump’s lawyers argued that Presidents were immune from criminal investigation and prosecution. Trump’s appellate counsel, William Consovoy, asserted that Trump couldn’t be prosecuted even if he fulfilled one of his most notorious campaign boasts: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Vance and his team rejected this imperial claim, insisting that nobody is above the law. Trump, in his effort to shield his financial records, took the fight all the way to the Supreme Court—and then back again, after the case was remanded—but the D.A.’s office won every round.

Vance, in a wide-ranging interview with me about his tenure as Manhattan D.A., said, of appearing before the Supreme Court, “Truly, it was like Mt. Olympus.” He declined to discuss the Trump case, as legal ethics require, but he did disclose that he will not seek a fourth term, and that he plans to retire from the D.A.’s office on December 31st. Eight Democratic candidates are campaigning for the job, and, given the city’s liberal leanings, the victor of the Democratic primary, in June, is all but guaranteed to win in November.

Even before the Trump case crossed his desk, Vance had largely decided not to run for reëlection. He and his wife, Peggy McDonnell, felt that he had done much of what he set out to do—among other successes, he and his federal partners had secured judgments in a dozen major bank cases, producing more than fourteen billion dollars in fines and forfeitures. This inflow covers the D.A.’s annual budget many times over, and also pays for a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar fund for community-justice programs. But Vance is sixty-six, and the pressure of managing one of the highest-profile prosecutorial offices in the country has been wearying. “It turned out to be tougher than I thought it would be,” he conceded. He told me that, although his larger-than-life predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, held the office for thirty-five years—retiring at age ninety—he himself was ready to give the next generation a shot. “There’s nothing worse than a politician who doesn’t know when to leave,” he said.

He had decided to keep his intentions quiet until after the Supreme Court ruled on Trump’s tax records, partly because he feared that some of the more outspokenly anti-Trump candidates for his job might alienate the conservative Justices. His decision to leave midcourse, however, exposes the case to the political fray of an election. Some candidates have already made inflammatory statements denouncing Trump, and such rhetoric could complicate a prosecution.

The investigative phase of the Trump case will likely be complete before Vance’s term ends, leaving to him the crucial decision of whether to bring criminal charges. But any trial would almost surely rest in the hands of his successor. Daniel R. Alonso, Vance’s former top deputy, who is now a lawyer at Buckley, L.L.P., predicts that if Trump is indicted “it will be nuclear war.”