For a change, a New York district attorney has handed former president Donald Trump some legal good news. The Westchester County district attorney’s office, according to Business Insider, concluded its investigation into The Trump Organization and the former president himself earlier this month without bringing any legal action.
According to a source with knowledge of the probe, “District Attorney Mimi Rocah closed the investigation earlier in June,” the publication reported.
Elliott Jacobson, a special prosecutor chosen by Rocah, reportedly resigned his position in late 2022, according to a source who isn’t permitted to talk publicly. According to the source, Jacobson concluded that the information acquired throughout the inquiry did not support any criminal allegations, did not pertain to activity that was past the statute of limitations, and did not overlap with any other active investigations by law enforcement, the site stated.
A sizable percentage of the material came under the jurisdiction of the New York attorney general’s office. According to Insider, the attorney general’s office has the power to file civil lawsuits, whereas the district attorney’s office is only allowed to pursue criminal charges.
The source also said:
New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a blockbuster civil lawsuit against the Trump Organization in September, which is scheduled to go to trial this October.
The district attorney’s office in Westchester — a county north of New York City — opened the investigation two years ago. It examined whether the former president’s family business illegally misled authorities about the value of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to pay lower property taxes. For years leading up to the criminal investigation, the village of Ossining had been entangled in civil litigation with the club over the property’s true value and appropriate tax bill, court records reviewed by Insider show.
According to the New York Times, the office subpoenaed the golf course’s financial documents in 2021. The investigation’s specifics, however, have become scarce over time. According to a source with knowledge of the issue, the scope of the probe was eventually expanded to consider the former president’s behavior personally when determining the worth of the golf club.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has been looking into the Trump Organization’s finances for a long time, and Rocah’s office came upon other investigations against the company. For a long time, the district attorney’s office had been investigating the organization’s finances, even resorting to legal actions that twice reached the Supreme Court to collect tax data.
“Manhattan prosecutors brought criminal charges against the company and then-CFO Allen Weisselberg in the summer of 2021, alleging they falsified tax payroll tax records, and won at trial last fall,” Insider noted.
A Manhattan grand jury accused Trump in May on 34 criminal counts of manipulating financial documents pertaining to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star. Prior to the 2016 election, Trump allegedly paid Daniels to stay quiet about an affair the two of them had in 2006.
Trump entered a not guilty plea to all counts, and the case is being criticized by notable people as being politically driven and lacking in substance.
Famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the professionals who has questioned the validity of the legal arguments supporting Bragg’s case, claiming that he is relying on “made-up laws” to mount a political attack.
“Nobody should ever be arrested based on made-up laws or combining a federal and state statute,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times in an interview in March when news broke that Trump could be criminally charged. “I taught criminal law for 50 years at Harvard, and the one rule was, no creativity is permitted by prosecutors. The law has to be clear.”
In addition, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count federal charge against Trump alleges that he inappropriately maintained and handled secret documents.
Tuesday, the former president appeared in a Miami federal courthouse to enter a not-guilty plea to those allegations as well.