Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. told a federal court Monday that his office was pursuing a broad inquiry into possible fraud by President Donald Trump and his private businesses, based on reports that had appeared in the media.
The New York Times reported:
The Manhattan district attorney’s office suggested on Monday that it has been investigating President Trump and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a significantly broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past.
The suggestion by the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., came in a new federal court filing arguing that Mr. Trump’s accountants should have to comply with a subpoena seeking eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns. Mr. Trump had asked a judge to declare the subpoena invalid.
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In the new filing, the prosecutors did not directly identify the subject of their inquiry. But they said that “undisputed” assertions in earlier court papers and several news reports about Mr. Trump’s business practices showed that the office had a wide legal basis for the subpoena.
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They cited newspaper investigations that concluded the president may have illegally inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to lenders and insurers. They also included an article on the congressional testimony of his former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who told lawmakers last year that the president had committed insurance fraud. Lawyers for the president have denied wrongdoing.
The links above all refer to reporting by the New York Times, which apparently is the source for Vance’s claims of possible fraud.
Vance’s filing comes after the Supreme Court ruled in a pair of cases last month that the president could not demand that local prosecutors meet a heightened burden for an ordinary subpoena, but that Congress did not have the right to demand whatever documents it wanted of the president.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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