D.A.: Inquiry of Trump focuses on tax fraud

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which has been locked in a yearlong legal battle with President Donald Trump over obtaining his tax returns, suggested for the first time in a court filing Monday that it had grounds to investigate him and his businesses for tax fraud.

The filing by the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., offered rare insight into the office’s investigation of the president and his business dealings, which began more than two years ago.

Vance, a Democrat, has never revealed the scope of his office’s criminal inquiry, citing grand jury secrecy. The investigation has been stalled by the fight over a subpoena that the office issued in August 2019 for eight years of the president’s tax returns.

Lawyers for Trump have said the subpoena should be blocked, calling it “wildly overbroad” and politically motivated. Vance responded to that argument in a carefully worded new filing that did not directly accuse Trump or any of his businesses or associates of wrongdoing and took pains to avoid disclosing details about the inquiry.

However, prosecutors listed news reports and public testimony that alleged misconduct by Trump and his businesses. The reports, prosecutors wrote, would justify a grand jury inquiry into a range of possible crimes, including tax and insurance fraud and falsification of business records. It was the first time the office had suggested tax fraud might be among the possible areas of investigation.

“Even if the grand jury were testing the truth of public allegations alone, such reports, taken together, fully justify the scope of the grand jury subpoena at issue in this case,” prosecutors wrote.

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, declined to comment on the district attorney’s filing.

The president has said he expects the dispute over the subpoena will end up in the Supreme Court. “This is a continuation of the witch hunt, the greatest witch hunt in history,” Trump said last month.

After the subpoena was issued, Trump sued in federal court to block it, arguing that as a sitting president, he had blanket immunity from any criminal investigation. That dispute ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which in July handed down a landmark decision ruling against Trump.