One of the critical things that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow pointed out on Monday night was that former Manhattan special assistant to the district attorney, Mark Pomerantz, wrote that Trump was under nine criminal investigations.
Maddow discussed a racketeering case and the Stormy Daniels hush money case. The other seven cases are related to financial fraud Pomerantz says he uncovered and is also detailed in the nearly 300-page indictment by the New York Attorney General. While she can charge Trump with civil crimes, Pomerantz makes the case that many of these financial fraud crimes are also criminal.
As for the RICO case, he explained that even if the current DA, Alvin Bragg, was willing to bring the charges, he's not sure the office could handle the weight of such a case. Instead, he argued it should be done by the federal government at the Justice Department and through the Southern District of New York.
Pomerantz’s book, The People vs. Donald Trump, describes the investigative team at the DA's office in NY (DANY) as "composed mainly of lawyers from the Major Economic Crimes Bureau."
After listing the Stormy Daniels hush money payments investigation, he points to Trump's taxes as the second case, which came from the fact that the DANY read The New York Times reports published in the summer and fall of 2020. Pomerantz explains that the DANY didn't have the Trump taxes at the time. The articles highlighted the use of "consulting fees" to skirt taxes.
The third and fourth criminal inquiries focused on Trump's accounts with Deutsche Bank.
"One issue was whether Trump had defrauded Deutsche Bank by getting financing through the use of overstated financial statements and asset valuations," Pomerantz writes. "This would later become an issue of overriding importance, but as of late 2020, DANY had simply noted that the issue was ripe for investigation, based, in part, on information that Michael Cohen had provided. The office also was looking at whether Trump had engaged in money laundering by depositing foreign assets into Deutsche Bank accounts that were maintained outside the United States."
The fifth has to do with the financial documents that Trump provided to the General Services Administration when he made a bid for the "Old Post Office" he wanted to turn into a luxury hotel.
He lists the sixth case as "the treatment of income from leasing communications equipment located on the top of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Manhattan."
Seventh is "the restructuring of a loan that Trump had received from Fortress Investment Group in connection with a Chicago skyscraper."
The eighth case Pomerantz lists is insurance fraud, which has been outlined in a report from The New York Times about Zurich North America, an insurance company that required independent appraisals on his assets. According to the report, the bookkeeper, Allen Weisselberg, falsely claimed that they obtained independent appraisals. It's unclear if Weisselberg signed any paperwork swearing to that, but if he did, he's on the hook for insurance fraud.
Ninth is "the accuracy of the information that Trump had submitted to Ladder Capital Finance, an entity that had extended loans on various Trump properties."
At the time, Pomerantz writes that he didn't know whether the investigations were moving forward.
"It seemed unfocused and sprawling," he recalls. "I also thought that the district attorney would need a 'narrator' if he was going to build a credible criminal case. There were a lot of suspicious transactions and circumstances, but in a white-collar case it is difficult to persuade a jury that a defendant has committed a crime without a witness who can explain the wrongdoing and serve as a 'tour guide' through the events and the documents."
That's when questions about Michael Cohen surfaced. If Cohen was that so-called "tour guide," there was a concern that he could be discredited by Trump's lawyers because he'd previously lied to help cover up for Donald Trump.
None of those charges touch any possible tax fraud involved in inflating or deflating his assets, which is something the attorney general is focusing on.
The book, People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account, is officially on sale now, and Raw Story has full coverage of it here.
