On November 22, NBC News published report and analysis written by Tom Winter, a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit. Below is the article followed by the link to the article:
“It looks increasingly certain that on Jan. 20, 2021, around noon, Joe Biden will take the oath of office as president and Donald Trump will lose both his job and one of its most important perks.
Trump has faced investigations involving his campaign, his business and his personal behavior since he took the oath of office himself four years ago. As soon as he becomes a private citizen, however, he will be stripped of the legal armor that has protected him from a host of pending court cases both civil and criminal.
He will no longer be able to argue in court that his position as the nation’s chief executive makes him immune to prosecution or protects him from turning over documents and other evidence. He will also lose the help of the Justice Department in making those arguments.
While it’s possible he could go to jail as a result of some of the investigations of his business affairs, the soon-to-be-former president is more likely to face financial punishment in the form of civil fines, law enforcement observers believe. He may also be embarrassed by financial and other secrets that will be exposed in court. Nearly all his legal troubles are in his hometown, New York, where he once basked in the tabloid limelight as a young mogul and where he rode a golden escalator into an unlikely political career.
Here are some of the most perilous cases that await Trump when he’s no longer president — and here’s how he could yet use the powers of the nation’s highest office to escape punishment:
THE MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S CASE
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations for paying adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep silent about an affair she alleges she had with Trump. The indictment alleged that Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 before the 2016 election for the benefit of Trump.
Two prosecutors in New York seem to have picked up where federal prosecutors left off in examining Trump’s finances.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is looking into a variety of allegations of financial improprieties. Court documents show that Vance is investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” Trump’s family business, which could include falsifying business records, insurance fraud and tax fraud.
While the campaign finance violation of Individual-1 isn’t a federal case, New York state law says falsifying business records in furtherance of an illegal act is a felony. Cohen has also alleged that Trump effectively uses two sets of numbers in his business, one with higher values to secure loans and a second with lower values to minimize taxes, according to his congressional testimony and published interviews.
While Trump has declined to release his tax returns, saying he is under audit, The New York Times obtained many years of his tax records and determined that he had paid no federal income tax for 10 of the years and $750 in each of two other years.
Vance’s office has subpoenaed eight years of the president’s tax documents from his tax preparer, Mazars USA LLC, a subpoena the president fought all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in October 2019 that Trump wasn’t immune from having to provide the documents while president and could fight the subpoena only on the same grounds any other person could, on the merits.
Since the ruling, Trump’s legal team has fought the subpoena on its merits, but it has lost in the district and appeals courts. The Supreme Court must now decide whether to accept Trump’s emergency request for a stay of the lower courts’ rulings and possibly hear the case again or deny the stay. It’s unknown when the Supreme Court could announce a decision, which would be made by a high court that now includes three Trump appointees.
If the stay request is denied, Vance gets the documents as soon as Mazars can transfer the files. This is the only known criminal investigation involving Trump, and if he is convicted, the penalties could be solely or largely financial.
NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said he expects Vance to pick the “lowest hanging fruit” of crimes to charge, which would likely be tax evasion or falsifying business records.
The penalty for falsifying business records can be up to a year in prison with fines or probation with fines.
Cevallos said a person can be found guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree in New York “when he has the specific intent to defraud.”
“That means that he intends to cheat or deprive another person of property or a thing of value,” Cevallos said.
He said a lower-level employee could claim that he or she didn’t personally benefit from the crime or merely executed orders on someone else’s behalf. That affirmative defense likely wouldn’t apply to Trump.
THE NEW YORK ATTORNEY GENERAL’S CASE
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, meanwhile, is investigating four different Trump Organization real estate projects and his failed attempt to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. In March 2019, the office subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank. The fraud inquiry was reported to have been prompted by Cohen’s testimony before Congress that Trump had inflated his financial assets.
The attorney general’s investigation is civil, not criminal, but the office would be allowed to refer any allegedly criminal elements to local prosecutors like Vance.
The Trump properties that James’ office is investigating, according to court filings, include Seven Springs Estate, a 212-acre property just north of New York City that the company is seeking to develop; 40 Wall Street, a heavily leveraged building the company owns in Lower Manhattan; Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago; and Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles.
Trump has blasted the Vance and James investigations as politically motivated.
THE WOMEN
Multiple women have accused Trump of inappropriate sexual behavior in incidents alleged to date as far back as the 1970s. Trump has denied the allegations. A few of the women have taken legal action, and in the case with the most serious potential implications, Trump enlisted the Justice Department as his attorney to prevent submitting evidence.
Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll alleged in a 2019 book that more than 20 years earlier, Trump raped her in a department store dressing room. Trump denied the allegation, saying that Carroll wasn’t his type and that the claim was meant to spur publicity for her book of “fiction.” Carroll sued, saying Trump had defamed her by accusing her of lying.
The Justice Department moved the case from state to federal court and filed a motion to act as Trump’s defense attorney, saying his denial of her rape allegation was a presidential act.
A judge denied the Justice Department’s motion in late October. As a private citizen and a defendant in a civil suit, Trump may now be compelled to provide evidence — meaning testimony and, potentially, a DNA sample.
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” has also filed a defamation suit against Trump for denying her accusations of sexual assault. In a suit filed in early 2017, Zervos said he grabbed her breast and kissed her without permission. Trump agreed to testify, but his attorneys were able to postpone his testimony pending a decision from the New York State Court of Appeals, which isn’t expected until next year.
Legal experts said that the president could pardon himself before leaving office but that it’s unlikely that such an action would survive a challenge in court.
“Could I say that I’m the starting center fielder for the Washington Nationals? You bet I can,” said NBC News legal analyst Chuck Rosenberg, a former FBI official and U.S. attorney. “Does it make a damn bit of difference to the Washington Nationals? No.”
The Justice Department tackled this very issue on Aug. 5, 1974 — four days before Richard Nixon resigned as president.
In a memo written by an acting assistant attorney general, the Justice Department determined that “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself.”
The Justice Department opinion has never been tested in court. After he succeeded Nixon as president, Gerald Ford gave him a “full, free and absolute pardon” for any crimes he may have committed.
The 1974 memo does lay out a scenario for a self-pardon that experts have described as far-fetched and worthy of Hollywood. Says the memo: “If under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment the president declared that he was temporarily unable to perform the duties of the office, the vice president would become acting president and as such could pardon the president.
“Thereafter the president could either resign or resume the duties of his office.”
Any presidential pardon, whether bestowed by acting President Mike Pence or by Trump himself, would cover only federal crimes, which wouldn’t help Trump in his New York state cases.”
The link to the article is here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/what-trump-faces-jan-20-2021-n1247722#anchor-Thewomen
COMMENTARY
During the 2016 election, one of the most favorite chants Donald Trump relished with great joy from his adoring and cult like supporters was “LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP!” During Trump’s entire 4 years in office, Trump and his allies have lied repeatedly. Trump has gone out of his way to create lies out of whole cloth such as “I am the least prejudice person” and the election was rigged and a fraud.
One thing is for certain, bank accounts, financial documents, loan applications and tax returns will provide the necessary roadmap to any criminal grand jury indictment. Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank has now turned over all of Trump’s financial records that are being combed over and reviewed by both federal and New York State prosecutors. In the event that Trump is in fact charged, convicted and sentenced to prison for securities fraud, tax evasion, financial fraud on loan applications, insurance fraud, or tax fraud, he will likely proclaim he has been unfairly treated and persecuted.
If jailed and sentenced, Trump will proclaim that he is a “political prisoner” that he is unjustly being prosecuted for his political belief’s, which has nothing to do with his the likely charges he is faced with after he leaves office. What is downright pathetic, now that Trump is making it known he wants to run again in 2024, all of his supports will proclaim when and if he is convicted and imprisoned, that he is a “political prisoner” on the same level as South African President Nelson Mandela. You can envision his cult like supporters protesting and carrying around signs “FREE TRUMP!” Trump may want to flee to Russia, or North Korea and seek “political asylum” from his buddies Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un in exchange for all the secrets he knows.
With any luck, and if there is in fact equal justice under the law, and that no one is above the law, Trump will be moving his residence from the State of Florida and back to the State of New York to live in the gated community known as the “Attica Corrections Facility” to live out his remaining years with members of his family.