New developments bring the number of active investigations into the former president to eight.
New developments bring the number of active investigations into the former president to eight.
W ell, that didn’t take long. In my Saturday NR column, I noted that, while there are at least seven Trump investigations ongoing, there were certain to be more in the coming weeks and months. By early Monday morning, the New York Times was reporting that there is an eighth.
The new one is really an old one — a revival of the Manhattan district attorney’s probe of Trump’s business practices. That investigation appeared to have cratered earlier this year, as I detailed in February. It appears that the bulk of the matter will remain dormant — i.e., the part that hinged on former DA Cyrus Vance Jr.’s quest to compel production of Donald Trump’s personal financial records (requiring two trips to the Supreme Court). Clearly, those records did not turn out to be the mother lode that prosecutors hoped for. So, what’s reportedly getting a “jump-start,” as the Times puts it, is L’affaire Stormy Daniels. That’s the allegation that, during the 2016 campaign, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former “fixer” (as Cohen described his role), paid hush money to porn actress Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels is her, er, stage name) to conceal a tryst she says she had with Trump. Cohen has related that, at Trump’s direction, he paid Clifford $130,000 and was subsequently reimbursed by the Trump Organization, which employed curious bookkeeping that did not disclose the true reason for the payment. Trump has acknowledged the payment and the nondisclosure arrangement but denied — not very convincingly — both the fling and any nexus between his campaign for the presidency and the hush money paid a few days before the election to conceal an encounter said to have happened a decade earlier.
It seems boneheaded to reopen this sordid business. Put aside that the Trump matter is trivial compared to surging violent crime in the Big Apple which, to the increasing anger of New Yorkers, Vance’s successor Alvin Bragg is quite lax in prosecuting. Assuming that fraud is the theory of the new/old case, the statute of limitations in New York law is six years. Cohen paid Clifford over six years ago. But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the scheme is deemed to have extended a few months beyond 2016 because Trump did not reimburse Cohen until August 2017. Even so, the DA’s office previously determined that its theory of criminal liability under New York law would not hold up — reasoning that could be discoverable by the defense if Trump were charged. Moreover, the case would rely on information from (a) Cohen, a witness with so much baggage that federal prosecutors, who decided not to pursue a campaign-finance case against Trump, refused to give him a cooperation agreement (which is why Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to several felonies), and (b) Clifford, who later unsuccessfully sued Trump for defamation and thus owes him about $300,000 in legal fees. But wait! The Times says the DA’s office is also trying, yet again, to squeeze former Trump Organization financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who has repeatedly spurned them on this subject. The DA’s office already had Weisselberg plead guilty to trivial tax counts and is having him testify in an ongoing trial against the Trump Organization (more on that below). If they larded on a bunch of new charges to pressure him to change whatever story he has already told, defense lawyers would have a field day discrediting that testimony.
But it’s Trump, so anything goes.
In other Trump-investigation news, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s special-counsel appointment of veteran prosecutor Jack Smith (which I wrote about over the weekend here at NR and in the New York Post) has, of course, focused most attention on the two investigations covered by that assignment: (1) the inquiry into whether former president Trump is criminally culpable for obstructing Congress’s counting of state-certified electoral votes (which is broader than the question of whether he is actionably implicated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot); and (2) the probe of his retention of classified information and other government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Meanwhile, my above-linked Saturday column described two other probes that I had not previously examined: (a) an inquiry into whether, as president, Trump sicced the IRS on two of his top nemeses, the FBI’s former director and deputy director, respectively, Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe; and (b) a securities-law investigation scrutinizing the pending and uncertain merger between Trump’s new venture, the Trump Media and Technology Group (the corporate foundation for his Truth Social platform), and the public company through which he sought to capitalize it, Digital World Acquisition Corp. No need to belabor these. On the former, the IRS inspector general is investigating, and congressional Democrats will be taking a hard look as well, particularly in the Senate, where the party retained its majority in the midterms. On the latter, the SEC and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (the SDNY, in Manhattan) are investigating.
Besides all that, there are ongoing developments in the other three matters:
(1) In Manhattan, the state criminal trial against the Trump Organization resumed on Monday. It’s a short week because of Thanksgiving, so the trial will continue, probably for another two weeks or so. Bragg is prosecuting Trump’s family-run business on alleged tax-evasion violations that, though comparatively minor, are felonies. Which is to say, although the Trump Organization would be liable for only a bit over $1 million in fines if convicted, it would stand guilty of offenses that could complicate its current and prospective business and financing arrangements.
The case against the Trump Organization is built on Weisselberg, the business’s aforementioned financial officer. A few months back, he pled guilty to about 15 counts — which sounds like a lot, especially considering that progressive prosecutor Bragg usually prefers no counts, even in serious criminal cases. The Weisselberg charges are so trivial, however, that he is only looking at about 100 days in the clink, and maybe even no time at all. The offenses involved corporate perks (e.g., an apartment, tuition for his grandchildren) that should have been booked as income on which taxes should have been paid.
Last week, Weisselberg testified in the Trump Organization trial. He was of only limited help to prosecutors, who must prove that Trump and other executives (mainly, his adult children) knew about the scheme to avoid taxes. As the Times reports, Weisselberg said the former president knew the company was paying his rent and his grandchildren’s tuition, but neither Trump nor his adult children (who are company executives) knew about several other benefits, or that he was not properly reporting them for tax purposes. If that’s the best the DA’s office can do after years of squeezing and prosecuting Weisselberg to get him to turn on Trump, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to reveal whatever smoking gun the prosecutors have convinced themselves he’s got on the Stormy Daniels hush money.
(2) Recall that in September, New York’s progressive and overtly anti-Trump attorney general, Letitia James, filed a civil complaint alleging years of massive fraud by the Trump Organization — naming as defendants Trump and his adult children. As I observed at the time, this is not merely a case of an ambitious AG making a mountain out of a molehill; it is a case that criminal prosecutors — both the famously aggressive SDNY feds and the Manhattan DA’s office under Vance and Bragg — decided was not worth pursuing after years of investigation.
James’s civil lawsuit, based on a 220-page complaint, will probably take many years to resolve, by which point AG James, having had her publicity splash, will have moved on to the next thing (perhaps in 2026 she’ll mount the gubernatorial campaign she toyed with but abandoned in 2022). But that doesn’t mean Democrats will not continue exploiting the litigation in the interim. On that score, James has gotten a complaisant Manhattan judge, Arthur Engoron, to order that a monitor be installed to oversee the Trump Organization’s conduct of business.
This is strictly punitive. It’s not enough to say Trump et al. have not been convicted of anything; again, they are not even facing criminal charges in the case. But Engoron is an activist Democrat, which is how one gets the coveted position of judge at the state-supreme-court level. In an oddity of New York tradition, the “supreme court” is actually a lower court (the court of appeals is the state’s highest court, followed by the appellate division, which hears appeals from the supreme court). Engoron’s gig is an elected position, meaning he had to elbow his way onto a partisan slate of judicial candidates. (In a one-party state, placement on the Democratic slate makes election a fait accompli, which is why robes are donned by many a mediocrity.) If you want to get a sense of how the world works in the Empire State, check out the program from Engoron’s 2015 induction to the bench, in which he goes on for a couple of pages thanking Democratic Party power brokers and pretty much every party organization in the state (e.g., the Barack Obama Democratic Club, Northern Manhattan Democrats for Change, the Nuevo Caribe Democratic Club of El Barrio/East Harlem, the Sojourner Truth Democratic Club, the Village Independent Democrats, and so on).
I am thus sure you’ll be stunned to learn that, in prior rulings in the case, the meandering Engoron has emphasized that Cohen has said that Trump “cooked the books” of his company. From this assertion by Trump’s aforementioned “fixer” of dubious credibility, the learned jurist deduces that it would have been a “dereliction of duty” for James to refrain from investigating. For good measure, Engoron has intuited that his fellow elected Democrat James must have launched her investigation not out of animus — perish the thought! — but because Trump is “just a bad guy she should go after as the chief law enforcement officer of the state.” What could be more fair and impartial than that?
Trump is appealing Engoron’s monitor order to the appellate division, but one of its judges has already refused to stay the order while the appeal proceeds. That was Judge Angela Mazzarelli who, like Engoron, was elected to the supreme court before being elevated to the appellate division in 1994 by the late Mario Cuomo, then the state’s Democratic governor. A full appellate division panel (usually five judges) is scheduled to hear Trump’s objection next week, but in the interim Engoron is free to appoint a monitor. After Trump’s likely loss in the appellate division, he could try his luck in the court of appeals . . . whose justices were appointed by Mario Cuomo’s son, former governor Andrew Cuomo, the partisan Democrat who resigned amid scandal. Welcome to New York.
(3) We’ve previously related that yet another partisan Democrat, Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is conducting a criminal grand-jury investigation into efforts by the 2020 Trump campaign and its allies to pressure state officials to reverse President Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia’s popular election. She’s let it be known that she might charge the scheme as a racketeering case. In that connection, Willis has sought testimony from several notable Trump lawyers and confidants, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). The senator waged an extensive litigation to try to get the subpoena quashed, but as I observed last month, this would prove futile. On November 1, the U.S. Supreme Court did indeed rule against Graham. He is now scheduled to appear in Atlanta for testimony on Tuesday (November 22).
Update your scorecards.