Cy Vance’s investigation into Trump’s finances is a lot bigger than we thought

Donald Trump Departs for Atlanta

I have a dream. It’s a beautiful dream. My dream is that on the evening of November 3rd, we sit in our homes and watch as Joe Biden sweeps 40 out of 50 states with one of the largest vote counts in history. My dream is that Biden has coattails and that Nancy Pelosi’s House majority grows and we flip the Senate. My dream is that on November 4th, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is the first to announce widespread charges on the Trump family for their clearly criminal financial crimes. And after that, the dominos will just keep falling. Trump’s lame-duck months will be spent contemplating exile as Ivanka fascistically baby-whispers to Jared Kushner about which country would take them. Please, can we all work together to make my dream a reality? Manhattan DA Cy Vance is doing his part:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office suggested on Monday that it had been investigating President Trump and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a significantly broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past. The suggestion by the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., came in a new federal court filing arguing that Mr. Trump’s accountants should have to comply with a grand jury subpoena seeking eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns. Mr. Trump has asked a judge to declare the subpoena invalid.

Until now, the district attorney’s inquiry had appeared largely focused on hush-money payments made in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. In the new filing, the prosecutors did not explicitly identify the matters under scrutiny in the grand jury inquiry, which by law is conducted in secret. But they said that “undisputed” assertions in earlier court papers and several news reports about Mr. Trump’s business practices showed that the office had a wide legal basis for the subpoena.

“In light of these public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” there was nothing improper or even unusual about the subpoena, the filing said. The suggestion that the investigation, which has gone on for nearly two years, was broader than Mr. Vance’s office had previously acknowledged could raise the stakes for Mr. Trump, his company and its executives, if the inquiry were ever to lead to charges of bank or insurance fraud, which are felonies.

Asked about the investigation at a White House briefing, Mr. Trump called it a “continuation of the worst witch hunt in American history.”

“It’s a terrible thing that they do,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats. “It’s really a terrible thing.”

[From The New York Times]

It’s been widely assumed that when Cy Vance eventually gets his hands on Trump’s tax returns and the Trump Org’s business records, the financial crimes will be there, in plain sight. Meaning, Cy Vance had enough to indicate criminal behavior, that’s why he now gets to subpoena those records, and then he’ll see even more financial crimes. That being said, all of this is such a huge f–king conspiracy, and trying to untangle the web of deceit from Trump Org to Deutsche Bank to Russia is exhausting.

Trump Briefed on "Keeping American Communities Safe: The Takedown of Key MS-13 Criminal Leaders"

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.

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19 Responses to “Cy Vance’s investigation into Trump’s finances is a lot bigger than we thought”

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  1. Sierra says:

    My dream is better. Democrats will win in a landslide, super majority in both House & Senate.

    At the inauguration, Vice-President Kamala Harris will accept Trump on live TV. He will be dragged out of the office by 5-6 secret service agents. At the same time, his children will also be arrested on live TV.

    Once Dems remove Kavanaugh for lying under oath, they will add 4 progressive Supreme Court Justices, remove Electoral College and get rid of gerrymandering.

    Then I work up…

  2. CuteLittleHappyThing says:

    Sorry to sound cynical, but does it matter? Nothing ever comes of these investigations, and there are never any consequences.

    • LaraW" says:

      I’m sorry, but do you work in law? Do you know how long investigations can take? I have worked on cases that began in 1998 and were only resolved last year. So it seems a bit premature to state that nothing will come of the investigation.

      Case in point: Police began investigating Epstein in 2005; the FBI began their own investigation in 2006. He pled guilty and got his sweetheart deal in 2008. He was arrested again in 2019, 14 years after the first arrest. Maxwell was complicit in all of his crimes but was never prosecuted. Charges were only brought against her in 2020 and her trial date isn’t until July 2021 – 16 years after that first investigation.

      Does that mean the police shouldn’t have bothered to investigate back in 2005? By your logic, it seems the answer would be yes, because Epstein wasn’t punished to the full extent of the law in 2005. Yet here we are, 15 years later.

      If you’re looking for instant gratification, you are not going to find it in law. The whole point of the justice system, as designed by the founders, is that there is due process, a fair trial, and all of these things take time. Unless you prefer other judicial systems such as China, where arrest, trial, and execution all take place within three days.

      • CuteLittleHappyThing says:

        No need to sound condescending. He has the nickname Teflon Don for a reason, plenty of people feel the same way as I do.

        I am not seeking “instant gratification” from a legal standpoint, per se. Rather he has an unshakable and sizable “fan club” and it seems he faces no consequences of his behavior legally, socially, or otherwise.

      • LaraW" says:

        There’s also no need for you to be dismissive of the work that the DA’s office has done and is doing. You have no idea what the investigation is about, the scope, the information they’ve already gathered, and the legal strategy they are going to use.

        You statement implied that you were seeking instant gratification from the judicial system in the form of consequences resulting from an investigation.

      • CuteLittleHappyThing says:

        Good lord, I didn’t realize a law degree was required to voice discouragement over something on a gossip site. A pox upon me…I shall be sure and submit my thoughts to you prior to submission so you can show off your vast knowledge.

      • LaraW" says:

        You weren’t voicing discouragement – you were stating that their entire investigation is futile and worthless exercise. My reply was that it is worth putting in the time and effort, even if it appears at first glance that nothing has come of the matter.

      • liz says:

        The fact remains that Vance and his predecessor, Bob Morgenthau, should have been investigating Trump’s business dealings in the 1990s, if not earlier. There were public questions about his finances way back then. The legit banks refused to do business with him because it was widely known that he didn’t pay his bills. It was assumed that he was being financed by the Russian mafia, which was already making inroads into NY organized crime.

        Even if Vance is five or eight years into an investigation, that office was 15+ years behind the curve.

      • Lucky Charm says:

        @ LaraW” , I think they just mean that it seems like any investigation of this administration is dismissed or goes away. Technically, that may not literally be the case, but it’s what it looks like on the outside and is very frustrating. We would all love to read the morning headlines “Trump found GUILTY of …” and arrested.

  3. TeeBee says:

    Awwwww, Trump. He could grift, cheat and scam to his heart’s content as a private citizen, until his final days in his gilded brassy penthouse. BUT, not as POTUS. Not even with a hypocritical Republican Party willing to do almost anything to protect its busted and broken “leader”.

    I have always taken small comfort from the belief that Trump has regretted winning the election from day ONE. He’s ignorant and spoiled, but not necessarily stupid to his grifting ways. He knows he needed a certain level of separation from the people and power that would want to expose his criminality. He could buy his way out of a few pickles, leverage a little bit of his crass brand to foreign countries and customers that shared his penchant for excessive and vulgar displays of wealth. But he cannot hide nor sue his way out of this barrel of rotting fish heads. The taps are turned up all the way, he only has himself to blame. And whether it’s apropos or not, there are scores to settle, vendettas against him. He has about 50% of the nation’s voting population hungry for revenge. A lot of people who didn’t give a damn about him as a private citizen now are out for blood. I didn’t give two hoots about his gross Trump ways before November 2016, even though I always assumed he was a loser, liar, cheat. Now, I am part of a global audience that cares. Cares a lot that he is finally called to answer for his vanity, his hubris, his arrogance that he is above the law. Should I feel bad that I only care now that he has hurt people in the public eye as opposed to all of the scores of people he hurt as a private businessman? Not sure. But if his petty ego and spoiled life made him reach too high that he cannot be ignored any longer, so be it. He asked for this, whether he’s willing to admit it or not. Bring him down. Burn it with fire. Nuke it from orbit. Leave nothing standing.

  4. Lightpurple says:

    Vance took a bribe to let Ivanka and Junior out on a fraud case; I’m not trusting him

    • Marjorie says:

      Right with you, LP. My only hope is that he feels guilty and is trying to atone.

    • Sarah says:

      That’s what concerns me, he’s shown his willingness to make things go away if it’s worth his while before now and with this very family. I’m worries he’s just doing this for leverage with them.

    • LaraW" says:

      Yes, I can completely see the logic here: Vance went all the way to the Supreme Court to argue his case just so he could have leverage over the Trump family. This makes complete sense.

      Vance is named as a party in the lawsuit “in his official capacity as the District Attorney of the County of New York.” This is extremely common in court filings. You want to sue the Department of Defense? You name the defendant as Mark T. Esper, the current Secretary of Defense. However, just because Vance is a named party does not mean that he personally leads the case and determines its direction.

      Lead counsel on this case is Carey Dunne. He is in charge of the investigation, the filings, case strategy, etc. You can find his profile on the Manhattan DA’s website; it’s quite impressive.

      It’s true that Vance can and has directed that a case be dropped, not prosecuted, not investigated, and he has come under a lot of criticism and scrutiny for doing so, but he is not going to do that in a high profile case like this one. Vance as head of the Manhattan office is not representative of the values and ethics of every lawyer who works there. To paint everyone working for the Manhattan DA’s office with the same brush is unfair and in my opinion, disrespectful.

  5. lobstah says:

    My dream is to wake up on Nov. 4 and the front page of every paper shows his ugly mug and the headline YOU’RE FIRED! Anything else (arrests, convictions) would just be an extra scoop of ice cream, because at this point I don’t want to get my hopes up that he’ll ever a.) be held accountable b.) acknowledge his shitiness

  6. MerlinsMom1018 says:

    He misspelled “legitimate investigation”
    Meanwhile Hillary is all “you call that a witch hunt? Siddown and shaddup”