New York Magazine is asking if Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is punting the latest investigation of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization because he's leaving his 12 years in office.
The report cited a Washington Post story saying that Vance convened a new, "long-term grand jury to hear evidence about the Trump Organization's financial practices." The move grows the investigation that has been going on since 2019.
It was thought that the probe was concluding, but as it turns out Vance believed there was more to be done. In May, he convened a special grand jury that would work three days a week for six months investigating the group. Their term is about to expire, and despite Vance's promise to complete the charges before leaving office, it appears that isn't happening now.
It all began when Vance discovered federal prosecutors were finished with their investigation of Trump's hush money payments to former lovers ahead of the 2016 election. Trump Org CEO Allen Weisselberg was arrested for not paying taxes after getting financial gifts from the Trump Org. Still, the CEO has refused to cooperate with investigators, making his future uncertain.
NYMag claims that the Post story Thursday puts a "charitable gloss on the latest development, citing a "person familiar with the matter said the second grand jury was expected to examine how former president Donald Trump's company valued its assets," which "appears to be a separate issue than the one described in indictments from the first grand jury."
They dispute any accusation that it was all planned, noting that "the tax issues, now valuation issues — is difficult to reconcile with Vance's repeated statements about his intention to complete it before the end of his term, as well as years' worth of statements from the office and news reports about the scope and progress of the investigation."
Both could be wrong too since such things can take time. It's entirely possible that Vance just ran out of it and wanted to ensure he did everything he could before leaving.
"The contours of Vance's probe — and of Trump's corresponding criminal exposure — have never been entirely clear, but the office and stories in the press have suggested at various points that the investigation already encompassed a variety of possible financial frauds regarding the value of Trump's properties and assets based on potential misrepresentations to lenders, insurers, and tax authorities," said the report.
NYMag also confesses that it isn't clear what can be gleaned from the news of the second grand jury. While they speculate it could be about potential charges for Matthew Calamari the Trump Org COO, but it wouldn't be needed a new grand jury to do it. The evidence was already uncovered as part of the probe into Weisselberg. The report said that they could extend the grand jury, but the court would have to approve it. It could be that the grand jury was already much longer than most grand juries and Vance wanted to stay to the commitment not to keep them for more than six months.
However, one of the problems facing the new grand jury is that if they intend to admit testimony from the first grand jury they will have to call those witnesses all over again. That could result in changes in the stories and testimonies. That could cause problems in the court trial.
The other reason for the second grand jury is that Vance's team found something significant about the Trump Org. or even Trump himself.
"That tantalizing scenario remains possible but is improbable, mostly because if a major development of the sort that has widely been regarded as a necessary precondition to charging Trump had come to pass (like the cooperation of Weisselberg or grand-jury testimony of another key insider), there's a pretty good chance it would have been publicly reported. But nothing of consequence about the investigation has found its way into the public domain since Vance's last significant comment on the investigation — just six weeks ago — when he reiterated his intention to complete it by the end of the year, said the report.
New York Magazine also said that Vance's office has some past issues with their major white-collar investigations, whereas his replacement, Alvin Bragg campaigned on holding white-collar criminals accountable.
Trump is still facing other cases, including the defamation case from Summer Zervos, the Westchester County DA case about whether Trump inflated and deflated his assets to get lower taxes and higher capital. Trump is also part of a probe in Georgia, where the Fulton County DA is investigating whether Trump committed voter fraud when he demanded GOP officials change the election results.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is avoiding many of the Trump investigations and allowing extremal prosecutors to carry the burden and avoid any attacks by Republicans. That doesn't mean that the DOJ will continue to do so, however. There are still a documented 10 incidents of obstruction of justice by Trump during the Mueller investigation. While the Republicans in the U.S. Senate may have dismissed both impeachment trials, the DOJ can still move forward with their own charges. It would likely become a political issue, but Republicans will likely accuse the Biden administration of politically motivated attacks anyway because of the cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"All of that suggests, for better or worse, that Bragg is now about to become one of the country's most closely watched and consequential criminal prosecutors," the story closed.
