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Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance convened a grand jury to investigate the business dealings of Donald Trump and his family in New York City. This was likely done largely at the bidding of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio who had vowed to “run Donald Trump out of town.” He was also likely spurred on by state District Attorney Letitia James who has been running her own series of fishing expeditions into Trump’s affairs. Vance was replaced this year by the new, infamously soft-on-crime Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, who took over the investigation. Now, with more than six months invested in this effort and countless witnesses and documents having been examined, the grand jury is reportedly about to be dismissed. And it appears that no charges will be filed Against Trump or his business associates. (Mediaite)
A six-month grand jury convened to hear evidence in the investigation into the business dealings of former President Donald Trump has reportedly ended, and no charges are expected to be filed as the investigation appears to be waning.
Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg recently ceased sending evidence to jurors. Bragg inherited the investigation from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance.
Vance began the investigation following allegations Trump’s business lied about the value of its properties. It was alleged the Trump Organization did so for the purposes of leveraging tax breaks and receiving preferential loan treatment.
The WaPo described this development as a “criminal investigation that appears to be fizzling out.” And for once, I tend to agree with them.
Prosecutors had gone to the trouble of setting up a special “war room” in Manhattan for the specific purpose of gaming out the investigation into Trump. The WaPo reports that the room has now been emptied and abandoned. Also, Bragg stopped sending evidence and updates to the grand jury last month. A new jury is not expected to be empaneled.
So was this all just much ado over nothing? It’s certainly looking that way. The only thing they ever appeared to find as an excuse to bring charges against Trump was a claim that he had “inflated” the estimated value of his assets in an attempt to obtain more favorable loan and interest rates from lenders. He’s almost certainly done that, but so has pretty much every other large business in the country. Such things are rarely prosecuted.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that the statute of limitations for improperly reporting such business data is five years. Nearly all of the alleged incidents took place before Trump entered the White House, so most of them couldn’t be charged even if there was sufficient evidence and a will to do so.
This entire affair has, from the beginning, been nothing more than a fishing expedition as I suggested above. The very liberal city of New York is run by people who were enraged at Trump’s very existence once he ran for president, despite previously having very much enjoyed seeing all of the money and business he brought into the Big Apple. They were desperate to find something they could do to drag him into court and try to damage his reputation. This was all very similar to the aforementioned District Attorney Letitia James, who literally ran for office on a pledge to “go after” Donald Trump despite there not having been a single accusation of any wrongdoing on his part.
Now everyone will wind up shuffling their feet and looking rather embarrassed as the grand jury goes home and Trump remains in his new home state of Florida without facing a day in court. But I suppose this is what you get when you elect people who start investigations in search of a crime rather than investigating actual crimes which are reported. You can’t get Alvin Bragg to ask a judge to require bail for a suspect charged with a gun crime, but he was more than ready to lock up Donald Trump if he could find any excuse to do so. Sadly for Bragg, it looks like the star of that show won’t be coming home to perform for him.
Source: This post first appeared on HotAir
