Still, the case dragged on
CREW re-upped this yesterday.
Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. were close to getting indicted for felony fraud. The Manhattan DA dropped the investigation after getting a visit from a Trump lawyer who happened to be one of his major donors. #tbthttps://t.co/Ia3p0MhsLo
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) March 1, 2019
Oh yes, I remember that. I blogged it the day it appeared. Remember the exciting new development overlooking the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, where you could pay a huge price to buy a hotel room that you could occupy a maximum of 120 days a year? And the DA, Cyrus Vance, dropped the case?
In 2010, when the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the D.A.’s office opened an investigation of the siblings, the Trump Organization had hired several top New York criminal-defense lawyers to represent Donald, Jr., and Ivanka. These attorneys had met with prosecutors in the bureau several times. They conceded that their clients had made exaggerated claims, but argued that the overstatements didn’t amount to criminal misconduct. Still, the case dragged on. In a meeting with the defense team, Donald Trump, Sr., expressed frustration that the investigation had not been closed. Soon after, his longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case.
Kasowitz, who by then had been the elder Donald Trump’s attorney for a decade, is primarily a civil litigator, with little experience in criminal matters. But, in 2012, Kasowitz donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the reëlection campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., making Kasowitz one of Vance’s largest donors. Kasowitz decided to bypass the lower-level prosecutors and went directly to Vance to ask that the investigation be dropped.
On May 16, 2012, Kasowitz visited Vance’s office at One Hogan Place, in downtown Manhattan—a faded edifice made famous by the television show “Law & Order.” Dan Alonso, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, and Adam Kaufmann, the chief of the investigative division, were also at the meeting, but no one from the Major Economic Crimes Bureau attended. Kasowitz did not introduce any new arguments or facts during his session. He simply repeated the arguments that the other defense lawyers had been making for months.
Ultimately, Vance overruled his own prosecutors. Three months after the meeting, he told them to drop the case. Kasowitz subsequently boasted to colleagues about representing the Trump children, according to two people. He said that the case was “really dangerous,” one person said, and that it was “amazing I got them off.” (Kasowitz denied making such a statement.)
Vance defended his decision. “I did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed,” he told us. “I had to make a call and I made the call, and I think I made the right call.”
Just before the 2012 meeting, Vance’s campaign had returned Kasowitz’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution, in keeping with what Vance describes as standard practice when a donor has a case before his office. Kasowitz “had no influence, and his contributions had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case,” Vance said.
But, less than six months after the D.A.’s office dropped the case, Kasowitz made an even larger donation to Vance’s campaign, and helped raise more from others—eventually, a total of more than fifty thousand dollars. After being asked about these donations as part of the reporting for this article—more than four years after the fact—Vance said he now plans to give back Kasowitz’s second contribution, too. “I don’t want the money to be a millstone around anybody’s neck, including the office’s,” he said.
So there’s that.
Being bought is only half the battle. You have to be bought by the right people.
Money has a time value. If the donation served a purpose and helped get Vance re-elected, paying it back four years later is no biggy.
We’re all living in Stalag 17 now.
This is why I continue to shake my head at the American habit of electing officials of the law enforcement apparatus — sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, what have you. These are some of the last people who should be beholden to donors, or to a fickle electorate (who, frankly, are often motivated by an emotional reaction to crime, rather than by due attention to law and process). Yes, in Canada and probably most other democracies they’re still appointed by politicians, but at least that’s one level removed from the hurly-burly of electoral politics.
It’s nuts. So much of what we do is nuts. It’s as if the only thought we can form is “Opportunity to make $$$!” Even if it’s not our opportunity we still treat it as the obvious way to go.
I have a stupid question concerning American law wrt this quote:
“I did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed,”
Do you need evidence beyond reasonable doubt to do an investigation? I would have thought that for that you only need an initial suspicion with some evidence for it. Or is this just a way of phrasing it in a way the public will recognise and make people think”that’s sensible”, even though it isn’t?
Sonderval, there was an on-going investigation. Vance’s prosecutors obviously thought there was enough evidence to proceed with a prosecution, but Vance over-ruled them after receiving his ‘campaign’ donation. Not at all corrupt.
@AoS
My problem is especially with the wording. Would a DA only prosecute a crime when there is “evidence beyond a reasonable doubt”? I thought that would be the criterion for a guilty verdict, not for starting a prosecution. So was this way of phrasing it deliberately obfuscating the issue by mixing completely different criteria?
Sonderval, I assume that the DA operates much like the British Crown Prosecution Service, who will only send a case for trial if the prosecution can produce sufficient evidence to make a guilty verdict likely. As far as I’m aware, the CPS doesn’t take the defence case into consideration, so it cannot assume that the prosecution evidence will prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, merely that such evidence as the prosecution supplies strongly suggests that a trial is necessary. Certainly, in Britain at least, the defence counsel does not get to communicate with the CPS, which doesn’t seem to be the case in the States where the defence counsel apparently communicates directly with the DA.
I wondered the same thing, and in fact wrote a sentence saying so in the post, but then thought wait, maybe they do. Then I realized I just plain don’t know what the standard is. I don’t think it’s certainty, but I don’t think it’s maybe/maybe not either. I don’t know what it is, so I dropped the sentence.
But this is, remember, the SDNY, where Comey now-famously called them the chickenshit club because they were so intent on having a high conviction rate that they didn’t take difficult cases. So the standard is a matter partly of evidence and epistemology and the like but also of motivation. Comey’s point was that you have to risk failure to get at the high-powered shits who cover their tracks.
Oh and p.s. it’s not a stupid question at all.
@AoS + Ophelia
“make a guilty verdict likely.” seems not quite the same as “beyond reasonable doubt”. So another layer of dishonesty and obfuscation.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Looking at the original quote again, Vance’s excuse is very carefully worded indeed. He isn’t making a judgment on whether or not there is sufficient evidence to convict, because to do so would suggest that a crime had been committed for which the Trump/Kushner mob were probably guilty but for which solid evidence was lacking. He’s actually saying that he cannot state beyond reasonable doubt that a crime was committed* at all, so by ending the investigation when he did he’s managed to avoid accusing them of any potential wrongdoing whatsoever. Had the investigation been allowed to continue I’m pretty certain that more than enough evidence would have come to light to remove any doubt, although an honest DA would possibly have gone to trial with what Vance already had but chose to disregard.
*If a DA cannot differentiate between criminal practice and honest business practice, is that DA even in the right job.