NY Mag asks the question….
Why has it ONLY been a New York Attorney General’s civil case that is asking hard questions and making public possible fraud by Donald Trump and family on a LARGE scale?
Why has the Manhattan DA shied away from a criminal case based on the stuff the NY AG James has uncovered?
Why has the Southern District of NY’s Federal prosecutor’s office not gone ahead with this which has criminal fraud and tax implications?
(Trump told Maggie Haberman that if now gone Manhattan DA Morganthu was still in office he wouldn’t have problems in NYC, because the former DA was his’friend’….Is current DA Bragg his ‘friend’ also?)
But?
Remember….
America has NEVER had the situation where one of it’s President’s was so crooked that he needed to be charged criminally…
Bill Clinton beat the rap,….
Richard Nixon quit….
Donald Trump, so used to his illgal stuff, keeps pressing on, and will do so until someone or something STOPS him….
It maybe a state prosecutor that does so in the end….
Not the Feds….
This is not the case for some of the most potent federal criminal-fraud charges, which, as the AG’s office itself mentions in a footnote in the complaint, generally have “no requirement of loss or reliance.” That is one reason why, under ordinary circumstances, the sort of conduct alleged against Trump (and reported in the press for years since he ran for president) should have drawn the attention of federal prosecutors, who then should have conducted a fulsome probe into Trump’s finances. This would not have been a simple undertaking, but it would have been the most robust investigative vehicle possible — as a matter of the legal tools, resources, and experience available — for ascertaining whether criminal conduct occurred within the Trump Organization, including on the part of Trump himself.
As far as the public record suggests, that has not happened. Of course, many awful Trump appointees controlled the Justice Department during his presidency, and they may have prevented or curtailed any such effort. That partly explains why many legal observers were so quick to embrace and hypethe DA’s criminal investigation back when they thought it might ensnare Trump — notwithstanding a long history of suboptimal results in high-profile white-collar criminal investigations conducted during the tenure of the previous DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., who left office at the end of last year. At the time, that seemed to be the only avenue for some well-deserved criminal scrutiny of Trump’s business dealings.
That calculus should have changed after Trump lost the 2020 election, at which point the Justice Department under President Joe Biden could have gotten involved. At that time, however, Biden’s advisers were telling the press that he did not “want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor” and that he was concerned “investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite.” This was dispiriting and unwise but not exactly shocking since Biden had made similar comments while campaigning, at one point telling NPR that, though he would not interfere with the Justice Department’s judgment, he thought it would be “a very, very unusual thing and probably not very — how can I say it? — good for democracy to be talking about prosecuting former presidents.”….