The canceling of NY's governor essentially puts an end to this investigation of
Trump as the district attorneys serve at the pleasure of the governor.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2021 9:21 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump?
Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump?
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
12 March 21
Insiders say that the Manhattan District Attorney's investigation has
dramatically intensified since the former President left office. "It's like
night and day," says one. According to another, "They mean business."
On February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed over a hard
drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who, along with two
investigators, had driven up from New York City in a heavy snowstorm.
Although the exchange didn't look momentous, it set in motion the next phase of
one of the most significant legal showdowns in American history. Hours earlier,
the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a
subpoena for nearly a decade's worth of private financial records, including
his tax returns. The subpoena had been issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr., the
Manhattan District Attorney, who is leading the first, and larger, of two known
probes into potential criminal misconduct by Trump. The second was opened, last
month, by a county prosecutor in Georgia, who is investigating Trump's efforts
to undermine that state's election results.
Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he has been waging a ferocious
battle. His subpoena required Trump's accounting firm, Mazars U.S.A., to turn
over millions of pages of personal and corporate records, dating from
2011 to 2019, that Trump had withheld from prosecutors and the public.
Before Trump was elected, in 2016, he promised to release his tax records, as
every other modern President has done, and he repeated that promise after
taking office. Instead, he went to extraordinary lengths to hide the documents.
The subpoena will finally give legal authorities a clear look at the former
President's opaque business empire, helping them to determine whether he
committed any financial crimes. After Vance's victory at the Supreme Court, he
released a typically buttoned-up statement: "The work continues."
If the tax records contain major revelations, the public probably won't learn
about them anytime soon: the information will likely be kept secret unless
criminal charges are filed. The hard drive-which includes potentially revealing
notes showing how Trump and his accountants arrived at their tax numbers-is
believed to be locked in a high-security annex in lower Manhattan. A spokesman
for the Manhattan District Attorney's office declined to confirm the drive's
whereabouts, but people familiar with the office presume that it has been
secured in a radio-frequency-isolation chamber in the Louis J. Lefkowitz State
Office Building, on Centre Street. The chamber is protected by a double set of
metal doors-the kind used in bank vaults-and its walls are lined with what
looks like glimmering copper foil, to block remote attempts to tamper with
digital evidence. It's a modern equivalent of Tutankhamun's tomb.
Such extreme precautions are not surprising, given the nature of the case:
no previous President has been charged with a criminal offense. If Trump, who
remains the Republican Party's most popular potential Presidential candidate
and who recently signalled interest in another run, is charged and convicted,
he could end up serving a prison term instead of a second White House term.
Vance, the scion of a prominent Democratic family-the kind of insider whom the
arriviste Trump has long resented-now has the power to rewrite Trump's place in
history. The journalist Jonathan Alter, a longtime friend of the D.A. and his
family, said, "Vance represents everything that Trump, when he was in Queens
with his nose pressed up against the glass in Manhattan, wanted to conquer and
destroy."
Vance's investigation, which appears to be focussed largely on business
practices that Trump engaged in before taking office, may seem picayune in
comparison with the outrageous offenses to democratic norms that Trump
committed as President. But the New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat,
whose recent book "Strongmen" examines the characteristics of antidemocratic
rulers, told me, "If you don't prosecute Trump, it sends the message that all
that he did was acceptable." She pointed out that strongmen typically "inhabit
a gray zone between illegal and legal for years"; corrupt acts of political
power are just an extension of their shady business practices. "Trumpism isn't
just about him," Ben-Ghiat went on. "It's a whole way of being in the world.
It's about secrecy, domination, trickery, and fraud." She said, of Vance's
probe, "It's symbolic for the public, and very important to give the public a
sense of accountability."
The legal clash between Vance and Trump has already tested the limits of
Presidential power. In 2019, Trump's lawyers argued that Presidents were immune
from criminal investigation and prosecution. Trump's appellate counsel, William
Consovoy, asserted that Trump couldn't be prosecuted even if he fulfilled one
of his most notorious campaign boasts: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth
Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." Vance and his team
rejected this imperial claim, insisting that nobody is above the law. Trump, in
his effort to shield his financial records, took the fight all the way to the
Supreme Court-and then back again, after the case was remanded-but the D.A.'s
office won every round.
Vance, in a wide-ranging interview with me about his tenure as Manhattan D.A.,
said, of appearing before the Supreme Court, "Truly, it was like Mt.
Olympus." He declined to discuss the Trump case, as legal ethics require, but
he did disclose that he will not seek a fourth term, and that he plans to
retire from the D.A.'s office on December 31st. Eight Democratic candidates are
campaigning for the job, and, given the city's liberal leanings, the victor of
the Democratic primary, in June, is all but guaranteed to win in November.
Even before the Trump case crossed his desk, Vance had largely decided not to
run for reëlection. He and his wife, Peggy McDonnell, felt that he had done
much of what he set out to do-among other successes, he and his federal
partners had secured judgments in a dozen major bank cases, producing more than
fourteen billion dollars in fines and forfeitures. This inflow covers the
D.A.'s annual budget many times over, and also pays for a
two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar fund for community-justice programs.
But Vance is sixty-six, and the pressure of managing one of the highest-profile
prosecutorial offices in the country has been wearying. "It turned out to be
tougher than I thought it would be," he conceded. He told me that, although his
larger-than-life predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, held the office for
thirty-five years-retiring at age ninety-he himself was ready to give the next
generation a shot. "There's nothing worse than a politician who doesn't know
when to leave," he said.
He had decided to keep his intentions quiet until after the Supreme Court ruled
on Trump's tax records, partly because he feared that some of the more
outspokenly anti-Trump candidates for his job might alienate the conservative
Justices. His decision to leave midcourse, however, exposes the case to the
political fray of an election. Some candidates have already made inflammatory
statements denouncing Trump, and such rhetoric could complicate a prosecution.
The investigative phase of the Trump case will likely be complete before
Vance's term ends, leaving to him the crucial decision of whether to bring
criminal charges. But any trial would almost surely rest in the hands of his
successor. Daniel R. Alonso, Vance's former top deputy, who is now a lawyer at
Buckley, L.L.P., predicts that if Trump is indicted "it will be nuclear war."
