[The contest between Vance and Trump is about much more than a
financial investigation. It’s a stress test of the American justice
system.] [[link removed]]

CAN CYRUS VANCE, JR., NAIL TRUMP?  
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Jane Mayer
March 12, 2021
The New Yorker
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_ The contest between Vance and Trump is about much more than a
financial investigation. It’s a stress test of the American justice
system. _

Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he’s been ferociously
battling Trump., Widline Cadet

 

On February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed
over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who,
along with two investigators, had driven up from New York City in a
heavy snowstorm. Although the exchange didn’t look momentous, it set
in motion the next phase of one of the most significant legal
showdowns in American history. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had
ordered former President Donald Trump
[[link removed]] to
comply with a subpoena for nearly a decade’s worth of private
financial records, including his tax returns. The subpoena had been
issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, who is
leading the first, and larger, of two known probes into potential
criminal misconduct by Trump. The second was opened, last month, by a
county prosecutor in Georgia, who is investigating Trump’s efforts
to undermine that state’s election results.

Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he has been waging a
ferocious battle. His subpoena required Trump’s accounting firm,
Mazars U.S.A., to turn over millions of pages of personal and
corporate records, dating from 2011 to 2019, that Trump had withheld
from prosecutors and the public. Before Trump was elected, in 2016, he
promised to release his tax records, as every other modern President
has done, and he repeated that promise after taking office. Instead,
he went to extraordinary lengths to hide the documents. The subpoena
will finally give legal authorities a clear look at the former
President’s opaque business empire, helping them to determine
whether he committed any financial crimes. After Vance’s victory at
the Supreme Court
[[link removed]],
he released a typically buttoned-up statement: “The work
continues.”

If the tax records contain major revelations, the public probably
won’t learn about them anytime soon: the information will likely be
kept secret unless criminal charges are filed. The hard drive—which
includes potentially revealing notes showing how Trump and his
accountants arrived at their tax numbers—is believed to be locked in
a high-security annex in lower Manhattan. A spokesman for the
Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to confirm the
drive’s whereabouts, but people familiar with the office presume
that it has been secured in a radio-frequency-isolation chamber in the
Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, on Centre Street. The
chamber is protected by a double set of metal doors—the kind used in
bank vaults—and its walls are lined with what looks like glimmering
copper foil, to block remote attempts to tamper with digital evidence.
It’s a modern equivalent of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Such extreme precautions are not surprising, given the nature of the
case: no previous President has been charged with a criminal offense.
If Trump, who remains the Republican Party’s most popular potential
Presidential candidate and who recently signalled interest in another
run, is charged and convicted, he could end up serving a prison term
[[link removed]] instead
of a second White House term. Vance, the scion of a prominent
Democratic family—the kind of insider whom the arriviste Trump has
long resented—now has the power to rewrite Trump’s place in
history. The journalist Jonathan Alter, a longtime friend of the D.A.
and his family, said, “Vance represents everything that Trump, when
he was in Queens with his nose pressed up against the glass in
Manhattan, wanted to conquer and destroy.”

Vance’s investigation, which appears to be focussed largely on
business practices that Trump engaged in before taking office, may
seem picayune in comparison with the outrageous offenses to democratic
norms that Trump committed as President. But the New York University
historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose recent book “Strongmen
[[link removed]]”
examines the characteristics of antidemocratic rulers, told me, “If
you don’t prosecute Trump, it sends the message that all that he did
was acceptable.” She pointed out that strongmen typically “inhabit
a gray zone between illegal and legal for years”; corrupt acts of
political power are just an extension of their shady business
practices. “Trumpism isn’t just about _him_,” Ben-Ghiat went
on. “It’s a whole way of being in the world. It’s about secrecy,
domination, trickery, and fraud.” She said, of Vance’s probe,
“It’s symbolic for the public, and very important to give the
public a sense of accountability.”

The legal clash between Vance and Trump has already tested the limits
of Presidential power. In 2019, Trump’s lawyers argued that
Presidents were immune from criminal investigation and prosecution.
Trump’s appellate counsel, William Consovoy, asserted that Trump
couldn’t be prosecuted even if he fulfilled one of his most
notorious campaign boasts: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth
Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Vance
and his team rejected this imperial claim, insisting that nobody is
above the law. Trump, in his effort to shield his financial records,
took the fight all the way to the Supreme Court—and then back again,
after the case was remanded—but the D.A.’s office won every round.

Vance, in a wide-ranging interview with me about his tenure as
Manhattan D.A., said, of appearing before the Supreme Court, “Truly,
it was like Mt. Olympus.” He declined to discuss the Trump case, as
legal ethics require, but he did disclose that he will not seek a
fourth term, and that he plans to retire from the D.A.’s office on
December 31st. Eight Democratic candidates are campaigning for the
job, and, given the city’s liberal leanings, the victor of the
Democratic primary, in June, is all but guaranteed to win in November.

Even before the Trump case crossed his desk, Vance had largely decided
not to run for reëlection. He and his wife, Peggy McDonnell, felt
that he had done much of what he set out to do—among other
successes, he and his federal partners had secured judgments in a
dozen major bank cases, producing more than fourteen billion dollars
in fines and forfeitures. This inflow covers the D.A.’s annual
budget many times over, and also pays for a
two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar fund for community-justice
programs. But Vance is sixty-six, and the pressure of managing one of
the highest-profile prosecutorial offices in the country has been
wearying. “It turned out to be tougher than I thought it would
be,” he conceded. He told me that, although his larger-than-life
predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, held the office for thirty-five
years—retiring at age ninety—he himself was ready to give the next
generation a shot. “There’s nothing worse than a politician who
doesn’t know when to leave,” he said.

He had decided to keep his intentions quiet until after the Supreme
Court ruled on Trump’s tax records, partly because he feared that
some of the more outspokenly anti-Trump candidates for his job might
alienate the conservative Justices. His decision to leave midcourse,
however, exposes the case to the political fray of an election. Some
candidates have already made inflammatory statements denouncing Trump,
and such rhetoric could complicate a prosecution.

The investigative phase of the Trump case will likely be complete
before Vance’s term ends, leaving to him the crucial decision of
whether to bring criminal charges. But any trial would almost surely
rest in the hands of his successor. Daniel R. Alonso, Vance’s
former top deputy, who is now a lawyer at Buckley, L.L.P., predicts
that if Trump is indicted “it will be nuclear war.”

Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to engage in almost
unthinkable tactics to protect himself. Among his social circle in
Palm Beach, speculation abounds that Florida’s Republican governor,
Ron DeSantis, an ally, might not honor an extradition request from New
York if a bench warrant were issued for Trump’s arrest. Dave
Aronberg, the state’s attorney for Palm Beach County, doubts that
such defiance would stand. Extradition, he points out, is a
constitutional duty, and a governor’s role in it is merely
“ministerial.” But he admitted that the process might not go
smoothly: “You know what? I thought January 6th would go smoothly.
Congress’s role was just ministerial then, too.” (DeSantis did not
respond to a request for comment.)

Vance’s office could well be the only operable brake on Trump’s
remarkable record of impunity. He has survived two impeachments, the
investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, half a dozen
bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an
estimated four thousand lawsuits. And his successor, President Joe
Biden
[[link removed]],
so far seems to prefer that the Department of Justice simply turn the
page.

As a result, the contest between Vance and Trump is about much more
than a financial investigation. It’s a stress test of the American
justice system. George Conway, a lawyer and a Trump critic, who is
married to the former President’s adviser Kellyanne Conway
[[link removed]],
said, “Trump is a man who has gotten away with everything his entire
life. He’s an affront to the rule of law, and to all law-abiding
citizens.” In office, Trump often treated the law as a political
weapon, using the Justice Department as a tool for targeting enemies.
Now he is pitted against a D.A. who regards the law as the politically
blind foundation of democracy. As Conway put it, “For Trump, the law
is a cudgel. For Vance, it’s what holds us together as a
civilization. And that’s why people who thumb their noses at it have
to be prosecuted. If they aren’t, you’re taking a big step toward
a world where that is acceptable.”

Vance’s next move in the case against Trump is less clear. Although
his office is credited with numerous convictions during his
tenure—such as that of Pedro Hernandez, the murderer of Etan Patz
[[link removed]],
a six-year-old boy, in a case that had gone unsolved since
1979—critics assert that he has frequently retreated when faced with
rich and powerful criminal targets. Notably, in 2012, he dropped a
case involving two of Trump’s children, which centered on their
management of the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium, in lower Manhattan.
The tabloids have referred to Vance as Soft Cy, portraying him as a
well-meaning Boy Scout who lacks the killer instinct necessary for
nailing the biggest white-collar villains in New York. Preet Bharara
[[link removed]],
the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told
me, “I think he’s taken a lot of undue criticism. It’s hard. The
track record is not perfect. Maybe he’s been a little bit gun-shy.
But he’s upright and full of integrity.”

As Vance faces an adversary whose character is in many ways the
opposite of his own, some of his perceived weaknesses may become
strengths. Trump has accused prosecutors investigating him of waging a
political vendetta. After the Supreme Court upheld Vance’s
tax-records subpoena, Trump denounced the probe as “a continuation
of the greatest political Witch Hunt in the history of our Country,”
and claimed that it was “all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat
location, New York City and State.” Given Vance’s sober,
methodical reputation, such attacks may fall flat. “We don’t
operate politically,” he told me. He mentioned that, whenever he
goes to his office, he walks past the hulking courthouse complex at 60
Centre Street. “There’s a stone inscription over this huge
building. It says, ‘The true administration of justice is the
firmest pillar of good government.’ ” The quote, he noted, is
attributed to George Washington. “When you have all the power we
have as prosecutors, it can’t be levelled against people for
political purposes. We’ve prosecuted Republicans and Democrats, and
we’ve investigated and _not_ prosecuted Republicans and Democrats.
It’s got to be based on the facts.”

Vance maintains this earnest line, and discretion, even in private
conversations with friends. Jonathan Alter recalls that, as far back
as 2017, when he tried to bring up the subject of a Trump prosecution,
Vance refused to discuss it: “He’s like Joe Friday—‘Just the
facts.’ ” Alter said that Vance’s sense of himself as a
straight shooter reflects “this whole noblesse-oblige thing,”
adding, “That’s where he comes from.”

A third-generation public servant, Vance is a vestige of the old Wasp
guard. His father, Cyrus Vance, Sr., became Jimmy Carter’s Secretary
of State after years of government service, including top roles in the
Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. When the elder Vance was five
years old, his father died; he was reared by his cousin John W.
Davis, the Democratic nominee for President in 1924, who was defeated
by Calvin Coolidge. Davis went on to help establish the white-shoe law
firm Davis, Polk and the élite Council on Foreign Relations. Vance,
Sr., followed a similar path, becoming a partner at the prestigious
law firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett before joining the Kennedy
Administration, where he became the Secretary of the Army.

Vance, Jr., has struggled, as his patrician forebears did, with the
seamy demands of retail politics; like them, he is a cautious member
of the establishment who is uncomfortable with glad-handing and
infighting. In 1924, Davis, whom H. L. Mencken mocked as “a lawyer
on leave from the ante-room of J. P. Morgan,” denounced the Ku Klux
Klan—a political risk at the time—but then, in the early fifties,
he unsuccessfully defended “separate but equal” segregated schools
before the Supreme Court in a case that became Brown v. Board of
Education. Cyrus Vance, Sr., rose swiftly to top government posts, but
he, too, had trouble navigating politics. He evidently annoyed
President Carter by eschewing television-talk-show appearances. And,
in 1980, Vance, Sr., warned Carter that a proposed military plan to
rescue American hostages in Iran was too risky. Carter went ahead, in
a failed operation that killed eight servicemen and freed no hostages.
Vance, Sr., resigned. At the time, Vance, Jr., was attending
Georgetown Law. He told me, “My father was really struggling, in the
sense that the President was really not taking his advice. I think he
was probably humiliated. Or just hurt. But he wasn’t someone to go
out and express his hurt or upset.”

Although Vance, Jr., revered his father, he wanted to escape his
shadow. He told me that he initially worked for a West African
shipping company but “turned out to be a shitty businessperson.”
He then landed in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, which had
jurisdiction over cases involving some of the world’s biggest
criminal enterprises. (His pedigree surely played a role in his
getting the job: Morgenthau, the D.A. at the time, regularly hired
young men from famous families.) Vance soon became a member of
Morgenthau’s rackets bureau, which prosecuted many of the office’s
most challenging financial cases.

In 1988, Vance decided to move with his wife to Seattle. He recalls
that, as he was packing his car, his father, who had expected his son
to take his place in New York society, admonished him, “not in a
friendly way, ‘Cy—you are raising the white flag on your
career!’ ” But in Seattle Vance launched a firm that was a
notable success. One of his law partners, Robert Sulkin, told me that
Vance became “the go-to guy” in town for criminal defendants:
“He was great on his feet—quick-witted but never nasty.” Among
the people whom Vance represented was Thomas Stewart, a right-wing
corporate mogul accused of myriad campaign-finance violations.

In 2004, Vance returned to New York, to work at the firm Morvillo,
Abramowitz. Five years later, he ran for Manhattan D.A. Unlike his
legendary predecessors Thomas Dewey, Frank Hogan, and
Morgenthau—press-savvy crusaders who all sought higher political
office—Vance was a liberal policy wonk more interested in talking
about subjects like community-based crime-reduction strategies. He was
courteous but aloof; his idea of blowing off steam was to meditate
daily. Bruce Gyory, a New York political strategist, said, of Vance,
“He doesn’t like politics much, and he’s not all that good at
it.” Nevertheless, despite what the _Times_ called
[[link removed]] a nearly
fatal “aversion to self-hype”—and with the help of name
recognition, Morgenthau’s backing, and generous campaign funds—he
won.

The Trump family first attracted Vance’s legal attention a decade
ago. At the time, Donald Trump was a reality-TV star and a real-estate
developer spreading the lie that President Barack Obama
[[link removed]] hadn’t actually been
born in the U.S. Trump had cultivated a relationship with Morgenthau,
hosting him and his wife at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach. Vance
knew Trump only casually, having crossed paths with him at events
around New York City. Vance’s office learned that condominium owners
at the Trump SoHo believed they had been cheated by Trump’s children
Donald, Jr., and Ivanka, who were managing the project for the family
business, the Trump Organization
[[link removed]]. The buyers alleged
that the Trumps had lied to them by inflating the number of apartments
that they had sold, thereby misleading them into thinking the
condominiums were better investments than they were.

Several prosecutors in Vance’s office wanted to press charges, but
he was unpersuaded. During the same period, he had repeatedly been
scorched in the tabloids after the collapse of a hasty attempt to
press rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn
[[link removed]], the prominent
French statesman and former head of the International Monetary Fund,
for allegedly forcing himself on a hotel housekeeper. Vance had lost
faith in the accuser’s credibility. But the woman’s lawyer,
Kenneth Thompson, blasted Vance for failing to “stand up.”
Justified or not, the Strauss-Kahn reversal was a public-relations
fiasco. A legal peer of Vance’s told me, “You can’t have cases
that fall apart. Does that affect someone psychologically? Maybe.”

Vance’s opposition to charging the Trump children in the SoHo case
stirred scandal after a 2017 investigative report
[[link removed]]—produced
jointly by ProPublica, WNYC, and _The New Yorker_—revealed that, a
few months after meeting with Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer for the Trumps,
Vance told his prosecutors that he had overruled their recommendation
to go ahead with the criminal case. Several months after Vance dropped
it, the report revealed, he accepted a sizable donation from Kasowitz.
After the article appeared, Vance returned the donation: thirty-two
thousand dollars.

Adam Kaufmann, the former chief of the Investigation Division in the
D.A.’s office, whom Vance overruled on the Trump SoHo matter,
dismisses the notion that Vance was bought off. Vance, he said,
“wrestled with the case from the beginning.” The condominium
owners were not particularly sympathetic victims—their apartments
were primarily used as pieds-à-terre—and real-estate practices in
New York are so often sleazy that it would have been hard to persuade
a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trumps were unusually
criminal. Kaufmann told me, “I did think there was enough there to
keep going, but I also understand his position. If I were the D.A.,
not a level down, I might have done the same.”

Vance defended his decision, telling me, “The job isn’t about
going after big targets just because they’re wealthy people. There
has to be sufficient evidence, and there have to be sufficient
reasons.” He noted, “At that time, the Trump family was just the
Trump family. He wasn’t President.” Vance’s team investigated
the case for two years, but he never became convinced that it merited
criminal charges. Among other problems, the apartment owners settled
their grievances privately with the Trump Organization, then declined
to coöperate with prosecutors. Vance said, “I had a hundred
thousand other cases in the office that year, with victims who
actually wanted us to take the case.”

Mary Trump, a psychologist and the former President’s niece, who is
suing him and two of his siblings for allegedly defrauding her out of
her proper inheritance, sees it differently. “Vance let two of my
cousins off the hook,” she told me. “If he hadn’t, he may well
have kept Donald from running. Do you really think he could have run
for President when two of his children were indicted for fraud?” She
hopes that Vance will be more aggressive this time, given that the
Republican Party—which has twice declined to convict Trump in
impeachment trials—clearly lacks the will to impede his possible
comeback. A felony conviction wouldn’t disqualify Trump from a
second term, but a prison sentence would certainly make it harder for
him to be elected again. “It’s incredibly urgent that Vance
prosecutes Donald now,” she said.

Vance has shown that he is capable of redressing his past lapses: last
year, his office delivered an impressive conviction in the case of the
movie mogul Harvey Weinstein
[[link removed]],
despite having declined to pursue charges against him five years
earlier. Weinstein was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for
sexual crimes against two women. Vance believed that they didn’t
have a strong enough case, but Ambra Battilana Gutierrez
[[link removed]],
a model who accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct in 2015, contends
that Vance should have pursued charges then: “Vance made the
mistake. It’s very clear who he listens to—the powerful and
rich—not a powerless model like me.” Vance returned to the case,
in 2018, only after the _Times_ and _The New Yorker_ exposed
Weinstein’s serial sexual predation. The belated conviction, perhaps
the biggest of the #MeToo era, helped bolster Vance’s reputation. He
now faces an even riskier target in Trump.

Vance launched his criminal probe into the President as a stopgap
measure in August of 2018, after federal prosecutors declined to
pursue him for his alleged role in the payment of hush money to the
porn star Stormy Daniels
[[link removed]].
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, she had threatened to reveal
publicly that she and Trump had had an affair. Trump’s former
lawyer Michael Cohen
[[link removed]] was
sentenced to three years in federal prison partly for crimes connected
to the hush money. But court documents made it clear that Trump
participated in the scheme with Cohen. The documents referred to the
President as “Individual-1,” who ran “an ultimately successful
campaign for President of the United States.” Yet Trump remained an
unindicted co-conspirator, because the Justice Department was
unwilling to prosecute a sitting President. State and local
prosecutors have their own authority to pursue crimes in their
jurisdictions, and Vance and the New York attorney general, Letitia
James, opened separate investigations of Trump, who was then a New
York resident, and whose business is based in New York.

Cohen was once Trump’s most loyal associate, willing to do and say
nearly anything to protect him. That has long since changed. On “Mea
Culpa
[[link removed]],”
a podcast that Cohen now hosts, he recently made his resentment clear.
“I went to frickin’ prison for him and his dirty deeds,” he
said. “It’s the Vance investigation that I believe causes Trump to
lose sleep at night. Besides the horror of actually having to open up
eight years of his personal income-tax statements, Vance is
accumulating a vast road map of criminality for which Trump must
answer.” Cohen, who has been coöperating with Vance’s office,
believes that Trump’s children and Allen Weisselberg
[[link removed]],
the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, are also under
legal scrutiny.

The initial focus of Vance’s inquiry was the hush-money payments.
Trump has denied any involvement with Daniels or with Karen McDougal,
a former _Playboy_ model who made similar allegations. But Cohen has
produced checks indicating that Trump reimbursed him for some of the
hush-money payments—and falsely described them as legal expenses.
Cohen has alleged that the payments were authorized by both Trump and
Weisselberg. Meanwhile, Trump’s story about the payments has
changed. He initially claimed no knowledge of them. Then, after his
lawyer Rudy Giuliani described the payments as reimbursements, Trump
said that they represented a “monthly retainer” for Cohen’s
legal services. Neither Trump nor Weisselberg has been charged with a
crime. (Mary Mulligan, a lawyer representing Weisselberg, declined to
comment.) But, if Trump or anyone in his company misrepresented the
illicit payoffs as legal expenses, they may have violated New York
laws prohibiting the falsification of business records. Such crimes
are usually misdemeanors, but they can become felonies if they were
committed as part of other offenses, such as tax fraud or insurance
fraud.

Vance’s probe has since expanded into a broad examination of the
possibility that Trump and his company engaged in tax, banking, and
insurance fraud. Investigators are questioning whether Trump profited
illegally by deliberately misleading authorities about the value of
his real-estate assets. Cohen has alleged that Trump inflated property
valuations in order to get favorable bank loans and insurance
policies, while simultaneously lowballing the value of the same assets
in order to reduce his tax burden.

As the _Times_ has revealed
[[link removed]],
Trump paid only seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income
taxes during his first year as President, and he paid no federal
income taxes at all during ten of the preceding fifteen years. He
claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in business losses, and
between 2010 and 2018 he reported twenty-six million dollars in
“consulting fees” as business expenses. Among these fees, $747,622
went to Ivanka Trump for projects she was already working on as a
salaried employee of the Trump Organization. The consulting fees are
being scrutinized by the legal teams of both James and Vance. James is
investigating possible civil charges. She obtained court orders that
forced the Trump Organization to turn over documents and that
compelled Trump’s son Eric, who helps run the company, to answer
questions. Vance, meanwhile, is focussed on criminal offenses. The
widened scope of the D.A.’s investigation was hinted at in a court
filing last August, which stated that the office was now looking into
“possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump
Organization.”

Several knowledgeable sources told me that, in the past two months,
the tone and the pace of Vance’s grand-jury probe have picked up
dramatically. A person who has been extensively involved in the
investigation said, “It’s night and day.” Another source, who
complained that things had seemed to stall while Vance waited for
Trump to leave the White House, and then waited for his tax records,
said, of the D.A.’s office, “They mean business now.” Earlier,
this source had felt that Vance’s team seemed slow to talk to some
prospective witnesses. But recently, the person said, prosecutors’
questions have become “very pointed—they’re sharpshooting now,
laser-beaming.” The source added, “It hit me—they’re
closer.”

The change came soon after the D.A.’s office made the unusual
decision to hire a new special assistant from outside its ranks—Mark
Pomerantz, a prominent former federal prosecutor. Pomerantz was
brought on, one well-informed source admits, partly “to scare the
shit out of people.” The press has characterized Pomerantz, who
formerly headed the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office
for the Southern District of New York, as a specialist in prosecuting
organized crime, largely because he supervised the team that, in 1999,
obtained a conviction of the son of John Gotti, the don of the Gambino
crime family. In fact, it was not a major case. Pomerantz’s deeper
value, say those who know him, is that he has spent the past two
decades at the eminent firm Paul, Weiss, artfully representing rich
and powerful white-collar criminal defendants. This experience makes
him capable not just of bringing a smart case but also of anticipating
holes through which a wily target might escape. “He’s a brilliant
lawyer,” Roberta Kaplan, a litigator who has worked with Pomerantz,
said. “He knows when to push and when not to.” Anne Milgram, a
former attorney general of New Jersey, who previously worked in the
Manhattan D.A.’s office, under Morgenthau, said that Pomerantz
“likely has greater stature than any of the candidates for D.A.
right now.” She believes his presence will insure that the Trump
case is in steady hands when Vance’s successor takes office. Given
Trump’s talk of a witch hunt, Milgram noted, the fact that Pomerantz
comes from outside the D.A.’s office helps take the case “out of
politics.”

Vance also recently hired a top forensic-accounting firm, F.T.I., that
is capable of crunching vast amounts of financial data. Taken
together, George Conway told me, the hirings “are signs that the
D.A.’s office is approaching this investigation very
seriously—they clearly think they have something, and they’re
trying to hone it and move it to a jury in New York.”

Milgram agrees: “In my experience, when you drill a hole, you
wouldn’t often go for eighteen months unless there’s some evidence
leading to a crime.” Bharara told me, “All the signals indicate
that there’s a belief on the part of that office that there’s a
good chance of a charge.” But, he warned, “no one should be under
the illusion that this is easy or a slam-dunk case.”

To some extent, the direction of Vance’s probe can be gleaned from
his office’s subpoenas, and from the questions that prosecutors are
asking potential witnesses. Deutsche Bank
[[link removed]], until recently one of
Trump’s largest lenders, has been subpoenaed and debriefed by
investigators. Employees at Aon, Trump’s former insurance company,
have reportedly been questioned. Vance’s team is also said to be
looking into whether the Trump Organization, after having a lender
forgive more than a hundred million dollars in loans for a skyscraper
project in Chicago, declared the windfall and paid taxes on it. In
addition, according to the _Wall Street Journal_
[[link removed]],
Vance’s team is intensifying its focus on financial dealings
involving Seven Springs, Trump’s estate in Mount Kisco, New York.
And, according to three people familiar with Vance’s probe, in
recent weeks Vance and Pomerantz, along with investigators in the
D.A.’s Major Economic Crimes Bureau, have conducted several
videoconference interviews with people knowledgeable about the Trump
Organization. Although Vance is described by one source as
“absolutely committed” to the probe, he has apparently asked few
questions during these sessions; Pomerantz has dominated, putting
interviewees at ease with jokes and exploring not just dry legal
details but also the social and corporate culture of the Trump world,
with an eye toward exposing how financial decisions were made. Since
the probe began, Michael Cohen has participated in seven sessions,
and, according to sources, he has not held back. He told prosecutors,
“Nothing goes on in the Trump Organization without Donald Trump
knowing it. It’s like the boss of bosses in an organized-crime
family. No one has to ask if the boss signed off. They _know_ he
did.”

Prosecutors may hesitate to call Cohen as a witness, given that he is
a convicted felon and an admitted liar. But Paul Pelletier, a highly
regarded former federal prosecutor, told me, “I’ve used much worse
people than him. Angels don’t swim in the sewers. You can’t get
angels to testify.” What would be crucial, he said, is corroborating
Cohen’s allegations.

Persuading an untarnished insider to flip against Trump would clearly
be a breakthrough. Judging from investigators’ questions and
subpoenas, their sights are set on Allen Weisselberg. “I think
he’s the key to the case,” Steven M. Cohen, a former federal
prosecutor who is close to many top political and legal officials in
New York, said. Mary Trump agreed, noting, “Allen Weisselberg knows
where all the bodies are buried.” As the man who managed Trump’s
money flow for decades, Weisselberg would certainly make a star
witness. He originally worked as a bookkeeper for Trump’s father—a
job that, Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law told me, he got after
answering a newspaper ad while driving a cab in Canarsie. By the
mid-eighties, he was bookkeeping for Trump.

Weisselberg isn’t believed to be coöperating with prosecutors, but
he may be vulnerable to pressure. He is seventy-three, and he has two
sons who are both potentially enmeshed in the case. Jack Weisselberg,
the younger son, works at one of the Trump Organization’s largest
lenders, Ladder Capital. It isn’t clear if Jack handled Trump
business there, but Ladder has loaned more than two hundred and
seventy million dollars to Trump, in connection with four building
projects. Among them is 40 Wall Street, one of the Trump properties
whose finances are being closely scrutinized by investigators.
Weisselberg’s other son, Barry, has been the manager of the Wollman
ice-skating rink and the carrousel in Central Park—cash-only
businesses that have been run for the city by the Trump Organization.
Michael Cohen, who worked with Allen Weisselberg for years, believes
that if prosecutors threaten him or his family with indictment—as
they did with Cohen himself—he will coöperate. “He’s not going
to let his boys go to prison,” Cohen told me. “And I don’t think
he wants to spend his golden years in a correctional institution,
either.” In 2018, federal prosecutors had to give Allen Weisselberg
grand-jury immunity in exchange for his coöperation in the Stormy
Daniels matter—a sign that he refused to be debriefed voluntarily.
Weisselberg’s sons, who could not be reached for comment, have not
been accused of any wrongdoing and are not believed to be
coöperating.

But investigators in Vance’s office have debriefed Jennifer
Weisselberg, a former professional dancer and choreographer who
married Barry in 2004 and had a contentious divorce from him in 2018.
Investigators have asked her about a gift that Trump gave to her and
her husband: free occupancy, for seven years, of an apartment
overlooking Central Park. In divorce proceedings, her former husband
described the apartment as a corporate property. If this gift was not
declared as a form of compensation on the Weisselbergs’ tax forms,
prosecutors could use the omission against the couple, as part of an
effort to squeeze Allen into coöperating with them. Bloomberg News
revealed the existence of the free apartment last year, after Jennifer
shared documentation of it. The article
[[link removed]] noted
that the apartment sold for two and a half million dollars in 2016.
After the story ran, Vance’s office reached out to her. In
Jennifer’s first extensive public remarks, she told me that, when
someone works for the Trump Organization, “only a small part of
your salary is reported.” She explained, “They pay you with
apartments and other stuff, as a control tactic, so you can’t leave.
They own you! You have to do whatever corrupt crap they ask.” (The
Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.)

Jennifer described her former father-in-law as being in Trump’s
thrall: “His whole worth is ‘Does Donald like me today?’ It’s
his whole life, his core being. He’s obsessed. He has more feelings
and adoration for Donald than for his wife.” Asked if Allen
Weisselberg would flip under pressure, she said, “I don’t know.
For Donald, it’s a business. But for Allen it’s a love affair.”

Jennifer told me that she first met Trump before she was married, at
Allen Weisselberg’s modest house, in Wantagh, on Long Island. That
day, the Weisselberg family was sitting shivah, for Allen’s mother.
Trump showed up in a limousine and blurted out, “This is where my
C.F.O. lives? It’s embarrassing!” Then, Jennifer recalled, Trump
showed various shivah attendees photographs of naked women with him on
a yacht. “After that, he starts hitting on _me_,” she said.
Jennifer claimed that Allen Weisselberg, instead of being offended on
her behalf, humored his boss: “He didn’t stand up for me!” Asked
about this, Weisselberg’s lawyer, Mary Mulligan, said, “No
comment.”

Weisselberg was known behind his back as the Weasel. His office door,
on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, shared a hallway with
Trump’s. Jennifer recalled, “You walk down the hall, it’s
Allen-Donald, Allen-Donald—they don’t do anything separately.
Allen would know _everything_.”

Many legal experts believe that, without an inside witness such as
Allen Weisselberg on the stand, it could be hard to persuade a jury
beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knowingly engaged in fraud. Tax
cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute, because the details are
dull and complicated; ignorance can be an effective defense. The
hurdle is proving criminal intent. And, as Bharara pointed out,
“Trump is actually very clever.” He learned from his early
mentor Roy Cohn
[[link removed]],
the infamous fixer and Mob lawyer, to leave no fingerprints. He writes
very little down, has no computer on his desk, has never had a
personal e-mail address, and relies on close aides to send text
messages for him. Also, as Barbara Res, an engineer who worked for
Trump, recalled, he is skilled at issuing orders obliquely. Res told
me, “He would direct work in a way that you knew what he wanted you
to do without him actually _telling_ you.”

The targets of complex financial prosecutions often defend themselves
by noting that their accountants and lawyers had approved their
allegedly criminal actions. Trump has already started making this
argument. In a statement denouncing the Supreme Court’s upholding of
Vance’s subpoena, Trump protested that his tax returns “were done
by among the biggest and most prestigious law and accounting firms in
the U.S.”

Andrew Weissmann, a relentless former federal prosecutor who once
headed the Justice Department’s criminal-fraud section—and more
recently worked on the Mueller investigation—says that Trump’s
accounting records might clinch Vance’s case. “Accounting records
can be fantastic,” he said. As a veteran of successful prosecutions
of the Gambino and the Genovese crime families, and also top Enron
executives, Weissmann told me that the first thing investigators will
probably do is a wealth analysis. “You pull everything,” he
explained. Prosecutors will likely create a time line and compare it
with various financial representations made by the Trump Organization,
looking for inconsistencies. If the accountants’ work records show
that they weren’t informed by Trump about misrepresentations that
the company made to secure financial advantages, then it will be much
easier to argue that Trump bears criminal responsibility. As Weissmann
put it, “Then you’re golden!”

Weissmann also thinks that bringing in F.T.I., the forensic-accounting
firm, is a major leap forward. Such experts “are the people you put
on the stand” to explain potential crimes to the jury: “The fact
that they are exterior to the office is really important. You can
discount the argument that they’re political. It’s invaluable.”

Although Trump ultimately outfoxed the Mueller investigation
[[link removed]],
Weissmann thinks that Vance is in a stronger position. For one thing,
Trump can’t fire Vance, so he can’t be intimidated. For another,
Trump can no longer pardon anyone, which means that recalcitrant
witnesses will feel more strongly compelled to testify.

Weissmann believes that Trump obstructed justice in the Mueller probe,
and would rather see him prosecuted for that. He said, of Vance’s
pursuit of Trump’s possible financial crimes, “It’s not ideal.
But at least there’s some accountability. You’re not just letting
bygones be bygones.”

If the case proceeds, some have argued, it won’t only be Trump on
trial but the justice system itself. After the D.A. was granted access
to his tax returns, Trump denounced what he called
“ ‘head-hunting’ prosecutors” as “fascism, not justice.”
In fact, according to Anne Applebaum, the author of “Twilight of
Democracy
[[link removed]],”
the American justice system, by holding leaders and ordinary citizens
equally accountable, protects democracy from fascism. The image of a
former President facing prison may seem un-American. But she noted
that, in other robust democracies, “it’s not uncommon for heads of
state to be prosecuted.” She warned that the lesson from democracies
under strain elsewhere around the world is that failing to lay down
the law “is dangerous—it creates long-term feelings of impunity,
and incentives for Trump and those around him to misbehave again.”
Vance’s case against Trump may be less than perfect, but the
alternative, she said, “is lawlessness.”

Earlier this month, the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was
found guilty of corruption and influence-peddling by a court in Paris,
and sentenced to prison. A previous French President, Jacques Chirac,
was convicted in 2011 of embezzlement and misusing public funds.
Silvio Berlusconi, the demagogic former Prime Minister of Italy, was
forced to perform community service after his 2013 conviction for tax
fraud. Ben-Ghiat, the N.Y.U. professor, believes there’s much to be
learned from Berlusconi. Italy initially voted him out of office in
2006, well after his corruption was exposed. But his center-left
successors did little to address his misconduct. Two years later, they
were defeated, and Berlusconi returned to power for another three
years. She warned, “If we have the chance to make a strong statement
that the rule of law matters, and we fail, the message is that these
strongmen can get back in power. That’s the lesson for us.” ♦

JANE MAYER [[link removed]], The
New Yorker’s chief Washington correspondent, is the author of
“Dark Money
[[link removed]].”

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