Donald Trump accused of ‘protracted criminal conduct’

The Manhattan prosecutor seeking Donal Trump’s tax records cites ‘possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct’.

Cyrus Vance in New York. Picture: Getty Images

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said it was justified in seeking financial documents from ­Donald Trump and his company as part of a complex investigation into alleged insurance and bank fraud by the Trump Organisation and its officers.

In a new legal filing on Monday (Tuesday AEST), District ­Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr urged a federal court to allow the office to move forward with its investigation of “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organisation” and to dismiss Mr Trump’s most recent challenge to its subpoena, requesting eight years of records from his accounting firm, Mazars.

“This is a continuation of the worst witch hunt in American history,” Mr Trump said at the White House.

The legal battle over Mr Trump’s tax records dates back to August last year, when the Manhattan district attorney’s office first subpoenaed Mazars. Mr Trump sued to block the subpoena, arguing that a sitting president couldn’t be criminally investigated.

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected the President’s claims of immunity from state-level grand jury investigations.

“In our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence’,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

“Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has ­included the president of the United States.”

Mr Trump’s lawyers vowed to continue fighting the subpoena with new arguments. They filed an amended complaint in Manhattan federal court last week, calling the prosecutor’s subpoena overbroad and issued in bad faith.

Mr Vance on Monday said that argument “rests on the false premise that the grand jury’s ­investigation is limited to so-called ‘hush-money’ payments made by Michael Cohen on ­behalf of (Mr Trump) in 2016”.

“The Mazars subpoena is no different from many grand jury subpoenas routinely issued in white-collar crime investigations, which are typically dependent on financial and corporate records,” he said.

Court documents cited articles by The Wall Street Journal, which exposed an alleged 2016 payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels who claimed she had an affair with Mr Trump, and by the Washington Post, which reported allegations the President inflated his net worth and property valuations to lenders and investors. Mr Trump has denied the ­affair with Daniels and that he knew about the payments when they were made. He has said his net worth fluctuates.

The Wall Street Journal