US President Donald Trump may be reveling in what he sees as “complete and total exoneration” from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but his legal perils are far from over.
Federal and state investigators in New York are deep into investigations of their own into Trump and those in his orbit, probes that some observers have long viewed as every bit as menacing as Mueller’s two-year look into possible collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.
“They are very real and very significant,” said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. “If you’re Trump, this has got to feel, in some ways, like an even greater threat than the Russia probe.”
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are pursuing at least two known criminal inquiries, one focused into possible corruption in Trump’s inaugural committee and another on the hush-money scandal that led his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to plead guilty last year to campaign-finance violations.
The president also faces inquiries from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who recently opened a civil inquiry into Cohen’s claims that Trump exaggerated his wealth when seeking loans for real-estate projects and in a failed bid to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.
Meanwhile, a state regulatory entity is looking into whether Trump gave false information to insurance companies.
Cohen told Congress in testimony last month he is in “constant contact” with prosecutors involving ongoing investigations.
Trump has dismissed the New York investigations as politically motivated harassment, a theme he and his supporters are likely to keep hammering in the wake of the Mueller findings.
The US Department of Justice on Sunday said that Mueller’s two-year investigation found no evidence that Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, and that it did not come to a definitive answer on whether Trump obstructed justice.
Reacting to the findings in Florida on Sunday, Trump called the Mueller probe “an illegal takedown that failed.”
The US attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment on the New York probes, but has told a federal judge it is still investigating campaign-finance violations committed when Cohen helped orchestrate six-figure payments to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, and a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, to keep them quiet during the campaign about alleged affairs with Trump.
Cohen said Trump ordered the payments and later reimbursed him for his efforts. So far, nobody besides Cohen has been charged.
Political observers have continued to speculate that Cohen, who is scheduled to report to prison in May, might secretly be providing investigators with additional information.
“If you’ve got Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, as a tour guide, that means you could go anywhere,” former New Jersey governor Chris Christie of New Jersey told MSNBC recently.
Cohen stoked speculation when he told Congress he was aware of other “wrongdoing” involving Trump, but could not talk about it because it was “part of the investigation that is currently being looked at by the Southern District of New York.”
Among other things, he suggested prosecutors were investigating communications he had with either Trump or one of his representatives in spring last year in the months after the FBI raided his home and office. At the time, Cohen was looking for information about whether Trump might consider giving him a pardon.
The president has denied breaking any laws and dismissed Cohen as a liar.
He derided the state investigations in New York as a “witch hunt,” calling the state and its Democratic governor and attorney general “proud members of the group of PRESIDENTIAL HARASSERS.”
Trump says the payments to Daniels and McDougal were a private matter unrelated to his campaign.
The White House has said Trump was not involved in the operations of his inaugural committee, which raised US$107 million to celebrate his election.
The inquiry into the committee has focused partly on whether donors received “benefits” after making contributions or whether foreign nationals made barred donations, according to a subpoena sent to the committee.
The same document shows prosecutors are looking at whether the committee’s vendors were paid with unreported donations.
The justice department has held for nearly a half-century that a sitting president is constitutionally immune from criminal prosecution, a conclusion Cotter referred to as Trump’s “ace in the hole.”
If prosecutors find evidence Trump committed a crime, they could wait to charge him after he leaves office, though the legal deadline for filing charges is five years for most federal offenses, including the campaign-finance violations in question in the Cohen case.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion