Cyrus Vance has had a years-long investigation into Donald Trump, his organization, and his family. Inflating or deflating the value of his properties to take advantage of bank loans he otherwise would not receive and ease his tax burden. He has left office now, and a new DA takes over the case, who has promised to continue the investigation into tfg.
Vance had promised to decide whether to indict Trump by the end of the year but the NY courts are on holiday from December 6 to January 2nd, 2022.
Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is set to leave office next week without bringing criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.
But Vance's successor, Alvin Bragg, has indicated that he'll keep up the pressure on Trump, and there are other signs that the investigation isn't slowing down any time soon.
Carey Dunne, who currently serves as general counsel to Vance and who's spearheaded the DA's arguments related to the Trump investigation in both federal court and the Supreme Court, has agreed to stay on the case, according to CNN. Bragg also wants Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor who tackled organized crime cases and whom Vance hired to work on the Trump investigation, to stay on.
"This is obviously a consequential case, one that merits the attention of the DA personally," Bragg told CNN in a recent interview.
He added, referring to Dunne and Pomerantz: "It's hard for me to evaluate not knowing the facts, but just having worked on lots of investigations that are complex, I can say that you've got two very good lawyers that have been looking at it for a while. I think it would be a disservice to Manhattan to lose them."
Cyrus sends love letters to Trump. Is the orange dingleberry ever going to get his comeuppance? No wonder I am so demoralized.
These are dark times for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., as two high-profile investigative reports—about Harvey Weinstein and Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr.—have revealed that Vance has a suspicious habit of declining to prosecute some of New York’s most powerful people, while, uh, also accepting campaign donations from their lawyers.
Last week, a joint bombshell by The New Yorker, WNYC, and ProPublica revealed Ivanka and Donald Jr. narrowly avoided criminal fraud charges in 2012 for allegedly misleading potential buyers at the flailing Trump Soho Hotel—because Vance dropped the mounting case after a meeting with Donald Trump Sr.’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. Kasowitz had donated $25,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign before the meeting (money Vance later returned) and went on to donate and raise a total of more than $50,000 in the months after the case against the Trump kids disappeared. Vance now says that, roughly five years later, he’ll return that money, too—but even a lawyer who was on the Trump defense team said Vance’s intermingling with Kasowitz “didn’t have an air you’d like.”
As DA, Vance has the authority to pass on prosecuting any case he wants—from the Trump kids to Weinstein—if he believes there isn’t enough evidence to warrant criminal charges. (By many estimations, at the time of the NYPD’s Weinstein investigation, the Manhattan DA’s office was still smarting from the failure of its case against yet another powerful alleged sexual predator, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.) But Vance’s MO in the high-profile Trump and Weinstein cases does, as the aforementioned Trump lawyer noted, have a suspicious air, and the parallels are hard to ignore: two powerful, wealthy white men and their families, two lawyers making campaign contributions to Vance, and alas, two cases dropped. Either Vance was using his judgment, or he can be bought for the price of a very nice European vacation. One has to wonder whether New Yorkers who don’t possess similar privileges would have seen the same result.
Weinstein was not the only predator Vance was asked to investigate and did not.
Perhaps, indictments will come in January after Vance leaves office. I’m not holding my breath, though.