The New York state attorney general’s office has announced it is now investigating the Trump Organization also in a “criminal capacity”, broadening its civil probe in a significant escalation of legal risk for former president Donald Trump, a one-time New Yorker who now lives in Florida.
Attorney general Letitia James’s office will join an ongoing criminal probe into the Trump administration being conducted separately by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance.
Trump is also facing a criminal investigation in Georgia state for allegedly trying to overturn the outcome of the election in 2020.
Trump and his wife Melania Trump now live in their Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but the Trump Organization, which was led by sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump during the Trump presidency, remains headquartered in New York City. And both probes started even when Trump was in White House.
“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organisation is no longer purely civil in nature,” Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the New York attorney general, said. “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time.”
Trump slammed the announcement as “an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime”. And said in a statement on Wednesday, “After prosecutorial efforts the likes of which nobody has ever seen before, they failed to stop me in Washington, so they turned it over to New York to do their dirty work. This is what I have been going through for years.”
The two parallel investigations are focused on charges – emerging from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony – that the Trump Organization downplayed the value of its properties and assets for tax purposes and inflated them to secure bank loans.
James’s probe had been focused on financial aspects, and the punishment for which could only be financial – such as the $2 million fine that resulted from her successful prosecution of the Trump Foundation earlier. Now, her investigation could lead to loss of liberty for Trump if he is convicted.
Vance’s probe is focused on the criminal aspect of the charges emanating from Cohen’s testimony, which followed his conviction in 2018 for election finance law violations for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress, who had claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Trump.
Trump could also face more scrutiny, this time from US Congress. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on Wednesday to create a bipartisan 9/11 style commission into the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol that Trump had incited to prevent a joint session of Congress from certifying President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.
The Democratic-led House is expected to vote it through, with some help from Republican lawmakers. But, its passage in the evenly split Senate seemed uncertain; 10 Republicans will need to vote with all 50 Democrats for it to go through. And, they are under pressure from the former president, who remains actively and aggressively in control of the party, to reject the commission.
“Republicans in the House and Senate should not approve the Democrat trap of the January 6 Commission,” Trump said. “It is just more partisan unfairness and unless the murders, riots, and fire bombings in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and New York are also going to be studied, this discussion should be ended immediately.”
