Money and the scales of justice

Bill Bramhall is on vacation. o you feel like it’s necessary to make large contributions (to politicians) in the cost of doing business?”

“I personally don’t,” replied the developer who’d given a fortune to various New York politicians in the course of doing business here. “I think the perception is in a way worse when I make a large contribution . . . where I was asking for something proper and even good, and a candidate really was under pressure to reject it because I made contributions to his campaign.”

That word-salad — which I stumbled over in the files Donald Trump biographer and indefatigable money-trail follower Wayne Barrett generously shared at the end of his life — came in 1988, as the august members of a special State Commission on Government Integrity came to 725 Fifth Ave., better known as Trump Tower, to question The Donald.

The exchange jumped out at me because of the questioner, listed in the transcript as MR. VANCE. That was the former secretary of state under President Carter, whose namesake son, Cyrus Vance Jr., is running unopposed for a third term as Manhattan district attorney amidst a brutal wave of stories about his decisions not to prosecute powerful people that came too late for anyone else to get on the ballot.

Start with Vance’s 2015 call not to charge Harvey Weinstein with forcible touching and sexual abuse after the NYPD provided an appalling tape, recorded by the victim, of him vowing “I won’t do it again” even as he cajoles her to enter his hotel room while threatening her career.

That old news was revisited, in a harsh new light, after the New Yorker published the recording in its blockbuster story last week in which several women accused the movie mogul of rape.

That came less than a week after the magazine reported that the DA’s Major Economic Crimes Bureau had spent two years building a fraud case, including smokinggun emails, against Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump for lying to prospective buyers about sales at the Trump SoHo.

Then in 2012, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, gave Vance $25,000, only to have the money returned when it quickly became apparent he had business with the DA's office, namely a sitdown with Vance himself to discuss the Trump SoHo case.

Months after that, Vance overruled his own prosecutors and told them to drop the case. Months after that, Kasowitz gave another $31,000, which Vance is now returning, while also revising his donor policies.

“Contributions have never influenced Cy Vance’s work and they never will,” a campaign spokesman said, stressing the “rigorous process” that led them to return the money years after collecting it and days after the New Yorker story.

Which is awfully little, awfully late, even if campaign cash had nothing to do with the DA’s decisions.

After a first term marked by the collapse of the rape charges he’d brought against powerful French politician Dominique StraussKahn, Vance’s office seems to have an aversion to sex-crime cases against famous people with very expensive lawyers.

And the Trumps are legendary for dragging out legal battles, which makes the Trump SoHo case — where the supposed victims themselves told the DA that they’d suffered no real harm, and the reported victimizers seemed far less politically relevant back in 2015 — a sensible one, politically speaking at least, to walk away from.

“If I like somebody or I think they are doing a good job in the city, I have a big stake in the city, and if I think somebody is better than somebody else, I generally support that person,” Trump said back in 1988 about why he gave so much to so many politicians here despite his disgust with city government.

Decades after Cyrus Sr. questioned Donald Sr. about doing business with local politicians, there was Donald Sr.’s attorney doing business with local politician Vance Jr. while he had Donald Jr. and Ivanka on the legal hook.

Kasowitz says he donated to the Manhattan DA because he is “a person of impeccable integrity,” and “a brilliant lawyer,” and that “I have never made a contribution to anyone’s campaign, including Cy Vance’s, as a ‘quid pro quo’ for anything.”

I take Kasowitz and Vance at their words, about there being no quid pro quo. But what Trump said back then about his gifts pressuring politicians to act against his interests didn’t play out this time.

The final question the Commission on Government Integrity posed to Trump was whether it made a difference “to you in that meeting (with a city official) that you may have given that person $150,000 over the past three years?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me. Your question is does it make any difference to them, and you’ll have to ask them.”