Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance revealed a new front in his long-running battle to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns on Monday.
Vance’s office disclosed that “it has 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 New York Times reported.
At the same time, prosecutors asked a federal judge to throw out Trump’s lawsuit challenging a subpoena for eight years of his personal and corporate financial records. The prosecutors argue that the issue has already been decided by the courts and the current lawsuit is merely a delaying tactic.
Monday’s filing suggested that the subpoena for Trump’s tax records “is part of an investigation into ‘possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,’ including potential fraud allegations detailed in media reports in recent years,” says The Hill.
Those “media reports” included past articles from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Times.
“Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Trump did not have any special immunity to a grand jury investigation like the one being pursued” by Vance.
Trump’s personal attorneys responded to that ruling by filing the current federal lawsuit, arguing that Vance’s subpoena “amounts to harassment of the President.”
All this goes back a year, when in August 2019, Vance’s office subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm for an investigation “which until now was believed to be focused on hush-money payments made to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump, including the adult film actress Stormy Daniels,” the Times says.
“Vance’s investigation is focused on the possibility that business records at Trump Organization were altered in an attempt to conceal the true nature of the payments,” the Post says.
