DANGEROUS POWER: Trump’s Business Empire Could Face Criminal Charges in New York City

Earlier this week, a New York court suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license. Now Manhattan prosecutors are about to file criminal charges against the Trump Organization. It’s horrendous. The Left will stop at nothing to prevent President Trump from running for POTUS in 2024, and destroy the pro-America movement that Team Trump represents.

Democrats are doing to America what China is doing to Hong Kong.

— Geller Report (@atlasshrugs) June 24, 2021

CYRUS VANCE‘S DANGEROUS POWER

With the newswires reporting the prospect — likelihood, some say — that President Trump’s business empire will be indicted next week in New York, we recommend reading Robert Jackson’s famous speech about prosecutors. The future Supreme Court justice delivered it in 1940 at Washington, where he was serving as FDR’s attorney general. He sought to warn a room full of prosecutors of their “most dangerous power.”

It follows, Jackson said, from the prosecutor’s obligation to choose his cases. It follows, he added, that he can “choose his defendants.” The danger that vexed Robert Jackson is that a prosecutor could “pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” And it looks to us as if Mr. Vance’s pursuit of President Trump is a textbook case of what Jackson warned against.

Said Jackson: “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”

Fast forward to the Trump case. News that the Trump Organization expects to be indicted emerged after Mr. Trump’s lawyers met Thursday with prosecutors under the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance. Prosecutors have reportedly been looking at fringe benefits the Trump Organization awarded an executive, Allen Weisselberg. Yet the idea that this is what is animating the vast investigation of Mr. Trump strains credulity.

A lawyer for Mr. Trump, Ronald Fischetti, is being quoted in, among other places, the Daily News as saying that in more than 50 years of practice, he has never before seen the DA “target a company over employee compensation or fringe benefits.” Mr. Fischetti is quoted by the News as saying the Trump Organization would plead not guilty and file a motion to dismiss the indictment.

We wish him luck. The idea that the Manhattan DA is suddenly on a tear about fringe benefits strikes us as ridiculous. Cyrus Vance wouldn’t give two cents for a case about fringe benefits awarded to a single aide. No, the fringe benefits bit is, as even the New York Times reported, “part of an effort to pressure” Mr. Weisselberg “to cooperate with a broader inquiry into Mr. Trump’s business dealings.”

Prosecutors trying to, in effect, extort individuals to cooperate in a criminal investigation goes on all the time, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. It has long been seen by partisans of due process as an abuse. To gain a feel for it we keep coming back to Robert Jackson’s speech. He was addressing a room full of federal prosecutors at the Justice Department, but he might as well have been talking directly about Cyrus Vance.

Jackson warned of “times of fear or hysteria” when “political, racial, religious, social, and economic groups, often from the best of motives, cry for the scalps of individuals or groups because they do not like their views.” The idea that the Democrats baying for Trump’s scalp during the past four years were operating about of “the best motives” strikes us as a bit naive 40 years after Jackson gave his speech.

The future Supreme Court justice, himself a Democrat, did make a particular warning about “subversive activities,” but he wasn’t talking about just communists and the like. He reminded his audience that the terms “Republican” and “Democrat” were themselves once seen as “epithets with sinister meaning.” He stressed the danger of “factional purposes,” a point to remember as an elected Democratic prosecutor goes after President Trump

https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1408518702400782360?s=20

Trump’s company could face criminal charges in New York City

By Associated Press, June 25, 2021

NEW YORK (AP) — Manhattan prosecutors are considering filing criminal charges soon against Donald Trump’s company, stemming from a long-running investigation into the former president’s business dealings.

The New York Times, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that charges could be filed against the Trump Organization as early as next week related to fringe benefits the company gave to top executives, such as use of apartments, cars and school tuition.

Trump Organization lawyer Ron Fischetti said he met virtually with prosecutors Thursday for around 1 1/2 hours to try and persuade them not to seek a criminal indictment against the company, but that the charges would not be unexpected.

“The charges are absolutely outrageous and unprecedented, if indeed the charges are filed. This is just to get back at Donald Trump,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “We’re going to plead not guilty and we’ll make a motion to dismiss.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment.

No charges have been filed thus far in the long-running probe. Prosecutors have been scrutinizing Trump’s tax records, subpoenaing documents and interviewing witnesses, including Trump insiders and company executives.

Law enforcement officials familiar with the matter say the investigation has reached a critical point. A grand jury was recently empaneled to weigh evidence and New York Attorney General Letitia James said she was assigning two of her lawyers to work with Vance on the criminal probe while she continues a civil investigation of Trump.

In addition to fringe benefits, prosecutors have looked into whether the Trump Organization lied about the value of real estate holdings to lower taxes or to obtain bank loans or insurance policies on favorable terms. They have also looked into the company’s role in paying hush money to two women who say Trump had affairs with them, accusations Trump has denied.

Some of the scrutiny has been focused on longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

Vance’s investigation of Weisselberg, 73, stemmed in part from questions about his son’s use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost, cars leased for the family and tuition payments made to a school attended by Weisselberg’s grandchildren.

Weisselberg’s attorney, Mary Mulligan, declined to comment.

There’s nothing illegal about companies giving lavish perks to valued employees, but in many circumstances those benefits count as compensation subject to income tax.

Fischetti said any charges against the company based on fringe benefits would be overreach by prosecutors.

“We looked back 100 years of cases and we haven’t found one in which an employee has been indicted for fringe benefits — and certainly not a corporation,” he said. For it to be a crime, he said, “it would have to be for the benefit of the corporation with the knowledge of the corporation. They don’t have the evidence at all.”

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