General Discussion

Grasswire2

(13,571 posts) Tue Jun 18, 2019, 01:43 AM Jun 2019

Re: Manafort-Rikers. Remember, the Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance crooked history with TRUMPS

Cyrus Vance.

This special treatment of Manafort is DIRTY. DIRTY.

[link:https://www.thedailybeast.com/manhattan-district-attorney-cy-vance-joins-the-trump-familys-private-chickenshit-club|

Add Cy Vance to the Trump family’s personal chickenshit club.

That’s the title of journalist Jesse Eisenger’s book about the federal prosecutors who let the bankers who blew up the American economy in 2008 off the hook. His New Yorker bombshell on Wednesday—written with his ProPublica colleague Justin Elliott and WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz—showed money talking and Trumps walking in Manhattan as the well-compensated Manhattan DA found a way to see no evil.
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That happened in 2013, when Vance—up for reelection—overruled his own prosecutors on the Major Economic Crimes Bureau and dropped a criminal probe of Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., even as his office seemed to have them dead to rights for misleading potential buyers of Trump SoHo condos. That project verged on collapse when units hit the market just after the economy fell off of a cliff in 2008. The DA’s office had emails, one person who’d seen them told the magazine, with the Trump kids desperate to salvage the project discussing how to coordinate their fraudulent statements to potential buyers—and Junior even assuring a broker, who was in on the reported hustle, that no one outside of the email chain and the Trump Organization would ever know about it.

But Vance dropped the case just after returning a $25,000 contribution from Donald J. Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz. In 2009, one of his colleagues at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman had run against Vance, and the firm had sent $300,000 to her campaign. After a $25,000 contribution in 2012 to Vance, bygones were bygones and Kasowitz soon had a meeting with the new DA himself to discuss the Trump SoHo case. That came days after his check was returned, which Vance told the magazine is his office’s standard procedure when a donor has a case before it. In any event, Vance said, the big give had “no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case”—which was already in the works when Kasowitz cut it.

Three months after Trump’s attorney “simply repeated the arguments that the other defense lawyers had been making for months,” according to the New Yorker report, the case against the kids was dead, and six months after that Kasowitz—who says his gift had nothing to do with the case that he asked Vance to drop, but came because he was “extremely impressed by him as a person of impeccable integrity”—gave the D.A. an additional $50,000.

Much more at link