On Tuesday, May 26, the New York Attorney General’s office announce that it is conducting a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business empire. It is a major expansion of what had previously been a civil probe. Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for Attorney General Letitia James, said in a statement:
“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the company is no longer purely civil in nature … We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan [District Attorney.]”
Link to quoted source material is here:
https://www.krqe.com/news/national/ny-attorney-general-says-trump-org-probe-is-now-criminal/
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has also been conducting a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization for over two years. Mew York Attorney General Letitia James and District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. are both Democrats. Attorney General James gave no explanation for what prompted the change in its approach to the investigation or why it chose to announce it publicly. CNN was first to report the development. District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. also declined to make any comments.
It was in November of 2019 that the New York Attorney General Letitia James issued subpoenas to local governments for records pertaining to Trump’s estate north of Manhattan, Seven Springs and a tax benefit Trump received for placing land there into a conservation trust. The New York Attorney General also looked at similar issues relating to a Trump office building in New York City, a hotel in Chicago and a golf course near Los Angeles.
The New York Attorney General civil investigation and the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal probe had overlapped in a number of areas. Both the investigations have included examining whether Trump or his businesses manipulated the value of assets by inflating them in some cases and minimizing them in others to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits.
MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY ANNOUNCES GRAND JURY ON TRUMP
On May 25, the Washington Post reported that the Manhattan District Attorney has convened a “special grand jury” that is expected to decide whether to indict former President Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, or his family members, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development.
According to the report, the panel was convened and will sit 3 days a week for six months. The 6-month special grand jury is much longer than a traditional New York state grand-jury of 3 months used to charge an array of felonies, indicating the volume of evidence expected to be presented. Special grand juries are convened to participate in long-term matters rather than to hear evidence of crimes charged routinely.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has been investigating the Trump organization for over 2 years. The convening of the special grand jury is the clearest indication that the District Attorney’s Office has found evidence of a crime by the former president, his business associates or even his two sons Don an Eric Trump or his daughter Envanka Trump and her husband Jared Cushner. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office investigation has included a look at hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf and the propriety of tax write-offs the Trump Organization claimed on millions of dollars in consulting fees it paid, including money that went to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office investigation is complicated and expansive. According to the Washington Post, the District Attorney investigators are known to have scrutinized Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is reportedly examining the compensation provided to top Trump Organization executives. The District Attorney’s investigation has focused in recent weeks on the Trump Organization’s longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. His former daughter-in-law, Jen Weisselberg, has given investigators reams of documents as they look into how some Trump employees were compensated with apartments or school tuition. Weisselberg was subpoenaed in the New York Attorney General’s civil investigation and testified twice in 2020.
Link to quoted source material is here:
DER FÜHRER TRUMP LASHES OUT
Late Tuesday May 25, in a statement issued, Der Führer Trump had this to say:
“[The seating of the grand jury is] a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history. … This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors. … Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!”
NOT THE FIRST TIME PROMOTING THE BIG LIE
On July 15, 2020, in an exclusive wide-ranging interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, President Trump was asked if he was “a good loser”. Trump said that he wasn’t a good loser and he went on to add that he thinks “mail-in voting is going to rig the election.” This led Wallace to ask whether Trump may not accept the results of the election and Trump said “We’ll have to see.”
https://time.com/5868739/trump-election-results-chris-wallace
On September 23, Trump was asked at a press conference if he would “commit to a peaceful transferal of power” if he lost the election, Trump said:
“Well, we’re gonna have to see what happens. … You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. The ballots are a disaster … Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a peaceful … there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”
Trump engaged in repeated attacks on mail in voting as a pathway to voter fraud. It was a claim that was unsubstantiated and was an outright lie that Trump kept repeating.
In April, 2020 Trump responding to a question about Wisconsin wanting to go to mail-in ballots said:
“Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters. … They’re fraudulent in many cases.”
Trump laid the foundation to dispute the election outcome with his incessant lies that “mail-in ballots” would result in a rigged election. Trump’s false claims were used as an excuse for the Republican Party to purge voter-registration rolls, limit mail-in ballots, close polling stations in minority areas and challenge in-person voting by minorities. The best example was in the state of Texas where Governor Abbot ordered only one polling place or drop off for ballots per county that has millions of residents and requiring hours of driving to hand deliver ballots.
Election experts say Trump’s critiques of mail-in voting was just another one of his many lies. Instead, they said mail-in voting was expected to improve voter turnout on the whole and there was little evidence that it will have a partisan effect by benefitting one party over the other.
The experts were proven right. Mail in voting improved voter turnout overwhelmingly. On October 19, 2020, it was over 71 million people had cast their ballots with early voting or mail in voting around the United States, surpassing the 58.3 million total pre-election votes cast in 2016. That’s almost half of the total presidential votes cast in 2016.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/politics/early-voting-key-states/index.html
On November 12, the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees issued the following joint statement that the “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”
It was on Wednesday, November 15 that Trump said the election was stolen and said:
“This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. … And this election has to be turned around because we won Pennsylvania by a lot and we won all these swing states by a lot.”
COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS
As the ancient saying goes:
“The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”
One thing is for certain is that after a full 4 years in office and 7 months after losing the 2020 election, the wheels of justice are turning slowly when it comes to Der Führer Trump. It appears likely that bank accounts, financial documents, loan applications and tax returns are providing the necessary “grinding” material to form the basis of criminal grand jury indictments against Trump. Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank have turned over all of Trump’s financial records that have been combed over and reviewed by both federal and New York State prosecutors. Then you have Trump’s former private attorney and fixer Michael Cohen whose offices and home were raided and volumes of documents seized to add to the grinding material.
Trump has gone out of his way to create lies out of whole cloth that the election was rigged and fraudulent with not a single scintilla of evidence. True to form, Trump is laying the ground work for his defense once indicted as he lays plans for his political comeback by saying:
“…[This is] a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history. This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors. Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!”
In the event that Trump is in fact charged, convicted and sentenced to prison for any number of counts of securities fraud, tax evasion, financial fraud on loan applications, insurance fraud, or tax fraud, he will likely proclaim he has been unfairly treated by the courts and persecuted. If jailed and sentenced, Trump will proclaim that he is a “political prisoner”, that he has been unjustly prosecuted for his political belief’s, none of which will have anything to do with the likely charges he is faced with for crimes he committed before being elected president in 2016.
The cult organization known as the Republican Party will believe him. Now that Der Führer Trump is hinting he wants to run again for President in 2024, all of his supporters will proclaim if he winds up behind bars that he is a “political prisoner” on the same level as South African President Nelson Mandela.
You can envision his Republican cult supporters protesting and carrying around signs “FREE FÜHRER TRUMP!, FREE FÜHRER TRUMP” . Then again, Der Führer Trump may try 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.
If in fact there is equal justice under the law, and that no one is above the law, Der Führer 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 and with members of his family in the “Attica Family Trump Wing”.
A link to a related blog article is here: