Yesterday evening, New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, announced, “We have informed the Trump Organization that … We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity.” According to The New York Times, James will be sending two of her office’s prosecutors to join the team of Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan DA. With this news, Donald Trump, those around him, and the country as a whole inch closer to the prospect that a former president could face criminal charges, and possibly even prison time. The country has not been through anything like this before.
The ongoing investigation is sweeping. James began it as a civil investigation following the 2019 congressional testimony of Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, that the Trump Organization had lied about the value of its assets in order to secure loans and insurance and to reduce its tax liability. Her focus includes the Trump Organization’s valuation of Seven Springs, a 213-acre estate in Westchester County, which it used to claim a $21.1 million tax deduction for a conservation easement on the property in 2015. James is also looking into a $160 million loan on a property at 40 Wall Street in Manhattan, which Trump personally guaranteed for $20 million, as well as “large portions of debt owed by the Trump Organization” relating to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Chicago, that were claimed as taxable income, and the valuation of Trump National Golf Club, in Los Angeles.
Vance’s municipal-level, criminal grand-jury investigation adds other areas of possible criminality to the scope of James’s state-level inquiry, including possible bank and tax fraud. Vance is also reportedly looking into hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and other women on Trump’s behalf—a maneuver that sent Cohen to jail for campaign-finance violations….
By Arne Kavli
By law, grand juries operate in secret, but it’s publicly known that Vance has also subpoenaed Mazars USA LLP, Trump’s personal accounting firm, for financial records relating to the former president and his businesses. In July 2020, the Supreme Court rejected a bid to protect those records from disclosure on presidential-immunity grounds, and Vance finally obtained Trump’s returns in February of this year. Vance’s office has reportedly interviewed Cohen at least eight times, and Cohen has stated that: “Unfortunately for Trump, I have backed up each and every question posed by the district attorney’s office” with “documentary evidence.” Vance has also sought records from two of Trump’s largest creditors, Deutsche Bank AG and Ladder Capital Corp, and from Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, which is attended by the grandchildren of the Trump Organization’s CEO, Allen Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trump family since 1973. In 2017, he became the only nonfamily member to serve with Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., to manage the trust established to hold Donald Trump’s business assets while president.
According to the grandchildren’s mother, Jennifer Weisselberg, more than $500,000 in tuition was paid through checks signed by either Allen Weisselberg or Trump himself as part of compensation for Allen Weisselberg’s son, Barry, from 2012 to 2019. Vance’s office has been trying to get Allen Weisselberg to cooperate with the investigation.* He was also involved in reimbursing Cohen for the $130,000 payment made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
For her part, James has also subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records relating to “consulting fees” it paid to Ivanka Trump, in addition to documents regarding the various properties implicated in the investigation. In October, Eric Trump sat for a deposition by lawyers in James’s office. The Trump Foundation dissolved amid an investigation by James’s predecessor, Barbara Underwood, into whether it violated laws in connection with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and whether its charity work was otherwise legitimate.
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Wow! Even though I believe it just seeing it in print is pretty shocking. Cohen may have been a piece of crap in his day but he has experience under the bigger piece of crap and knows him for sure!
That would be my guess, except for Ivanka. She seems to be the only person on the planet he has any feeling for. A weird and rather revolting amalgam of feelings, but feelings nonetheless.
But she’s also the only family member with enough smarts to commits lots of good fraud (going all the way back to some kind of real estate in Baku, per a years-old New Yorker article I remember). So if he wants to protect her, biggish IF, who will he try to throw under the bus instead? Not himself, I think Cohen is right.
I think he would try to protect Ivanka, but she is more involved in the criminality than the others.
Errrrr-yuk. It’s a cult.
Good. I hope it lasts.
I was reading Rubin’s column, and she seems to have the same stance as the US Ambassador under, I think, Clinton: rebuild Gaza on condition that Hamas gives up its rockets.
Then they have to explain to Gazans why they can’t have nice things, and that reduces their clout.
I can see the logic.
But it reduces the power of the people with the rockets, so I’m not sure how to headlock them into doing it. Right now, whenever power gets wobbly, Hamas creates some potholes on the other side of the fence, Israelis respond by turning everything to rubble. Mission accomplished for Hamas, who gets to keep parasitizing the citizenry because everybody is too furious/scared to get rid of them. Mission accomplished for Israel, who have re-weakened the Palestinians and prevented them from being any kind of counterparty to Israel.
If this situation didn’t serve Israel’s agenda too, I think they’re smart enough to see they’re being played by Hamas. But it does. Hamas and Netanyahu feed on each other.