People vs. Donald Trump by Mark Pomerantz

Author:Mark Pomerantz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The team also was pursuing investigative avenues apart from the financial statements. We were aware that the Trump children had a separate consulting business and checked to see whether that business was legitimate. We found no evidence convincing us to the contrary. We were also continuing to investigate the role of other Trump executives in the executive compensation scheme and following up on a host of other leads.

Life also intruded. I had cancer scans and an appointment with my oncologist in mid-July. The scans always produced some angst, but the radiology reports were clear. Then, on September 1, 2021, Hurricane Ida hit the greater New York area. The epic rainfall caused lots of flooding in our neighborhood. My wife and I watched with dismay as the water level rose around our home, and finally water began pouring into the house. At one point a small stream started flowing through the lower area of the house, where I did all my work. As the water got higher and higher, my wife (in her nightgown) and I were scurrying around my home office to rescue all of my Trump files from the flood and carry them upstairs to safety.

As the summer and Labor Day passed by, I realized that an enterprise corruption charge was not going to happen. The financial statement investigation had become all-consuming. The task of building out the proof on the whole pattern of enterprise corruption was simply too ambitious for the human and investigative bandwidth we had. We were not a special counsel office like the one that Robert Mueller had put together. Mueller had recruited the best and the brightest from across the Department of Justice. We were a local prosecutor’s office, with limited jurisdiction and a reluctance to bring sensational cases that did not fit comfortably within the office’s usual work. We had a handful of regular assistant district attorneys working on the case, supplemented by some young associates on loan from their law firms, and me—an old lawyer emerged from retirement and mostly working from home. We had two lawyers cross-designated to DANY from the attorney general’s office, but they also had to attend to their preexisting obligations, as did Carey Dunne. Carey was keeping a close eye on the investigation; however, he also had a full portfolio of other responsibilities in his job as general counsel to DANY.

We had tons of work to do just to move forward with the investigation of the financial statements, and pressure to make progress began to mount. Cy Vance had made it clear to me and Carey that he wanted to bring criminal charges against Trump by the end of the year, if warranted. Though Cy had not made a final decision, and a set of charges had not been teed up for his approval, everyone knew that he was leaving office at the end of 2021. His looming departure became the elephant in the room that nobody on the team wanted to discuss. The topic was virtually taboo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.