Five years and a million and a half pages and they have virtually nothing. Politics all the way. Real Third World stuff. In their obsession to get Trump they'll just strengthen his supporters. Why didn't the IRS get him? Or the feds? The author of this column (from NRO) is a former federal prosecutor.
"This indictment exercise has the distinctly foul odor of selective prosecution."
In the greater scheme of things, the charges appear to be puny. Essentially, they amount to failing to pay taxes on corporate perks — cars, apartments, and private-school tuition for executives’ children, according to the Wall Street Journal. If that’s all prosecutors have, then they have nothing. Donald Trump is not being charged, nor are his adult children who are the business’s top executives.
The Trump Organization, though, also has been indicted. Ordinarily, prosecutors shy away from charging a business. A company, after all, is just a legal form, not a person. Prosecuting the form rather than narrowly targeting people who have committed provable crimes only serves to punish innocent employees, who will lose their livelihoods if the indictment fatally destroys the business. But we are dealing not with norms but with Trump Rules fashioned by Democrats for their nemesis. If the DA can’t get Trump, he wants to be able to say he slayed the organization that bears his name.
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We are in a moment when violent crime is skyrocketing, but Empire State prosecutors are averting their eyes: declining to prosecute radical-left rioters and allowing gangbangers to prey on urban communities under non-enforcement, anti-police policies championed by Democrats. Somehow, though, Vance’s office has time to scorch the earth in hopes of finding something, anything, to pin on Donald Trump.
After lavishing time and resources on a quest to acquire years of Trump’s financial records — a quest attended by media leaks about supposedly imminent bank fraud, insurance fraud, and tax-fraud charges — Vance is left trying to squeeze out of the CFO the case he apparently can’t make on the documents. And understand, if there were a case here, it would be in the documents.
As I explained in ruminating on why strong circumstantial evidence cases are more attractive to prosecutors than informant cases, documentary evidence doesn’t lie. Financial records can’t be cross-examined, they are not looking to cut a deal with prosecutors, and they don’t have an ax to grind. If there is fraud in them, it can be proved by lining them up against other records and figuring out whether the books have been cooked. If they have, you don’t need the CFO as a star witness.
Whatever Donald Trump’s financial records say, Vance has thus far not been able to whip them into a prosecutable case . . . so now he’s trying to get Weisselberg to tell him something that can’t be seen in the black-and-white of the documents. Good luck with that.
Notice, by the way, that the supposed Trump financial-fraud crimes that we’ve been told so much about in the media are all federal offenses . . . yet Weisselberg is not being hauled into federal court. As we know from the heady Michael Cohen days, it is not as though federal prosecutors were not interested in Trump — they’ve tried very hard to make a case. But they appear to have abandoned the effort, and they are nowhere to be seen in the state prosecution Vance is jointly pursuing with Letitia James, New York’s ambitious progressive attorney general and avowed Trump tormentor.
That is telling. When I was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), which is less than a stone’s throw from Vance’s office, there was no way we would ever sit on our hands and let state prosecutors take a high-profile case featuring potential federal crimes. And we didn’t have to.
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Maybe someday, some prosecutorial Ahab will manage to ensnare Moby Trump. For now, though, by turning Allen Weisselberg into the latest Paul Manafort — the sap in whom everyone knows prosecutors would have no interest were it not for his connection to the Big Fish — all Democrats are doing is fueling Trump’s persecution narrative.
More importantly, they are angering fair-minded people who can’t help but see a two-tiered society, with its two-tiered justice system, in which Democrats and the radicals with whom they sympathize have immunity, while no infraction by a Republican — and especially, a Trump supporter — is too trivial for a good drawing and quartering.
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