A district attorney in New York has provided former President Donald Trump with some positive legal news for a change. According to Business Insider, the Westchester County district attorney’s office concluded its investigation of The Trump Organization and the former president without filing any charges earlier this month.
“District Attorney Mimi Rocah closed the investigation earlier in June,” the news source reported, citing a source familiar with the investigation.
Elliott Jacobson, a special prosecutor appointed by Rocah, resigned in late 2022, according to an unnamed source who is not authorized to speak on the matter. Jacobson determined that the evidence gathered during the investigation did not support criminal charges, involved conduct that occurred outside the statute of limitations, or duplicated ongoing investigations by other law enforcement agencies, according to a source cited by the news outlet.
The office of the New York attorney general assumed jurisdiction over a substantial portion of the material. Insider noted that while the district attorney’s office is constrained to prosecuting criminal cases, the attorney general’s office has the authority to file civil lawsuits.
The publication added:
In September, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a landmark civil lawsuit against the Trump Organization, which is scheduled to go to trial in October of this year.
Two years ago, the district attorney’s office in Westchester, a county north of New York City, initiated the investigation. It investigated whether the family business of the former president unlawfully misled authorities regarding the value of Trump National Golf Club Westchester in order to pay reduced property taxes. Court records reviewed by Insider reveal that the village of Ossining had been embroiled in civil litigation with the club over the property’s actual value and appropriate tax bill for years prior to the criminal investigation.
The office issued subpoenas for the golf course’s financial records in 2021, as reported by the New York Times. In the years that followed, however, few details about the investigation have been made public. The source with knowledge of the case disclosed that the investigation was expanded to include the former president’s personal conduct in determining the value of the golf club.
Rocah’s office encountered overlapping investigations into the Trump Organization, including a lengthy examination of the company’s financial matters by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In order to obtain tax records, the district attorney’s office had been investigating the organization’s finances for an extended period of time, even engaging in two Supreme Court-level legal disputes.
“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.
In May, a grand jury in Manhattan indicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents related to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump allegedly sent Daniels a payment prior to the 2016 presidential election to silence her about their alleged affair in 2006.
Trump pled not guilty to all charges, and prominent figures have criticized the case as feeble and politically motivated.
More on this story via Conservative Brief:
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