As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump is in a lot of legal trouble, which is unfortunate for him given the fact that legitimate lawyers want nothing to do with him and if it weren’t for the fact that the Republican Party had already decided to let him get away with inciting a violent insurrection, he almost certainly would have been found guilty at his second impeachment trial. (In fact, one of the attorneys on his dream team suggested the Department of Justice should arrest him if they thought he committed a crime.) Currently, the ex-president is the defendant in approximately 29 lawsuits, according to The Washington Post, though likely more worrisome to him are the criminal investigations he’s at the center of, particularly the one being led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. In the last several months, the D.A. has brought on the attorney who put John Gotti and other white-collar criminals behind bars, has reportedly been working to flip the Trump Organizations longtime CFO, and, most crucially, obtained Trump’s much sought-after tax returns, documents that the Queens-born real estate developer has gone to such extreme lengths to keep secret that some people have gotten the impression they contain extremely incriminating information. Now, Vance’s office has taken the next step in its criminal investigation: finding people who can explain to a jury why Trump is a possible crook.
Reuters reports that investigators are “combing through millions of pages of newly acquired records with an eye toward identifying witnesses who can bring the documents to life for a jury,” according to people familiar with the matter. Some of the individuals expected to testify are already well known and likely include the 45th president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, who has met with prosectors eight times. (In February 2019, Cohen told lawmakers that Trump regularly inflated and deflated his assets “when it served his purposes,” whether it was to reduce his tax bill or obtain loans. Last year, he said in an interview that Trump should go to prison for 360 years.) In addition, there’s Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization employee who has described himself as Trump‘s “eyes and ears” at the company and would seemingly know if his boss had committed fraud, whether of the bank, insurance, or tax variety. But according to reporters Jason Szep and Peter Eisler, “a growing universe of people, institutions, and agencies are being scrutinized” by Vance’s team. Per Reuters:
In addition to real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, which did years of work for the Trump Organization and appraised a property Trump used to obtain a tax easement—a tool ProPublica described as “a much-abused deduction exploited by wealthy investors” that has cost the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars—Vance has spoken to and requested records from Ladder Capital Corp. and Deutsche Bank AG, two of the former president’s biggest creditors. (Trump currently owes Deutsche Bank some $340 million and there is no love lost between him and the German lender, which could foreclose on the properties he used to personally guarantee his loans.) But according to Reuters, Vance’s investigation will “likely rely heavily on Trump’s closest associates—people who can address the key question of what Trump was thinking when he made the financial claims now under scrutiny.”
As for Cohen, whose credibility will surely be challenged by whatever lawyers Trump manages to scrounge up, said that “unfortunately for Trump, I have backed up each and every question posed by the district attorney’s office [with] documentary evidence.” If Vance’s team can corroborate Cohen’s testimony, Brodsky told Reuters, that would be “very powerful before a jury.” The government, he said, “loves people who plead guilty to crimes, take the stand and say,…‘I participated in a crime with that person sitting right there at the defense table, Donald J. Trump.’”
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