Investigation of president’s taxes for possible fraud
NEW YORK — A Manhattan prosecutor trying to get President Trump’s tax returns told a judge Monday that he was justified in demanding them, citing public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
Trump’s lawyers last month said the grand jury subpoena for the tax returns amounted to harassment of the president.
Manhattan District Attorney District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. seeks eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation relates to payoffs to women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
In a court filing Monday, though, attorneys for Vance said Trump’s arguments that the subpoena was too broad stemmed from “the false premise” that the probe was limited to socalled “hushmoney” payments.
“This Court is already aware that this assertion is fatally undermined by undisputed information in the public record,” Vance’s lawyers wrote. They said that information confirms the validity of a subpoena seeking evidence related to potentially improper financial transactions by a variety of individuals and entities over a period of years.
They said public reporting demonstrates that at the time the subpoena was issued “there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff ’s New York Countybased Trump Organization dating back over a decade.”
The Supreme Court recently rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that the president could not be criminally investigated while he was in office.