For months, some of Donald Trump’s top advisers have assured him that he has virtually nothing to fear from the Manhattan district attorney’s tax investigation, which they view as merely “fishing” for information. But investigators with the D.A.'s office have been expanding their criminal probe into Trump’s business empire, asking questions and grilling witnesses—as recently as in the past few days—not only about Trump but particularly about his eldest son, Don Jr., and Allen Weisselberg, one of the former president’s most trusted officers, The Daily Beast has learned.
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For years, Weisselberg has loyally served as the chief financial officer at the Trump Organization, and has been a fixture in separate investigations far beyond Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s team.
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[Former] President Trump continued to rake in millions from foreign business entanglements, with income flowing in from licensing agreements and buildings in various nations across the globe. And according to Forbes, Trump’s two sons also “unloaded $118 million worth of the president’s real estate since his January 2017 inauguration, striking deals everywhere from New York City and Los Angeles to Charleston, South Carolina and the Dominican Republic.”
Trump Jr.’s prominent role in the Trump Organization has attracted interest from another jurisdiction, as well. Early last year, the Washington, D.C., attorney general sued the Trump inaugural committee, as well as the Trump Organization, charging that they had misused over $1 million in fundraising when the committee “grossly overpay[ed]” in booking part of the Trump International Hotel in D.C. during inauguration festivities in 2017. Last month, the D.C attorney general’s spokesperson said that the office had alerted Trump Jr. that it sought to interview him as part of the ongoing investigation.
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And in their separate inquiry into Trump and his company, Manhattan prosecutors have also broadened the range of investigation into the Trump family’s assets, and have recruited some extra manpower. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Manhattan district attorney’s office had brought on Mark Pomerantz, a well-known former federal prosecutor, to aid in its investigation of Trump and his real-estate company.
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Meanwhile, some of former President Trump’s closest advisers have also been reassuring him for weeks that he has nothing to worry about and that New York investigators aren’t going to find anything to bring him down, according to two people who’ve spoken to the ex-president recently. “He’s asked about it a few times [in recent weeks], and I have told him, as I think he already believes, that it’s a lot of political grandstanding,” one of these people said.
Daily Beast
Gullible sort.
No longer a beneficiary of the significant legal privileges that come with being a sitting president, Trump has privately fretted that his enemies will be probing or “suing me for the rest of my life,” according to an individual who’s talked about this with Trump in the past few weeks.
His enemies. The State of New York.
On Monday, Trump released a statement complaining, “The Supreme Court never should have let this ‘fishing expedition’ happen, but they did,” and baselessly accusing his foes of engaging in “fascism” against him. In the written statement, he again regurgitated the lie that he “won” the 2020 presidential election in which he was decisively defeated by Democratic contender Joe Biden.
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