The legal clash between Vance and Trump has already tested the limits of Presidential power. 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.” “Trumpism isn’t just about him,” Ben-Ghiat went on. But the New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose recent book “ Strongmen” 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. 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. 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.” The journalist Jonathan Alter, a longtime friend of the D.A. 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. 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 instead of a second White House term. ![]() Such extreme precautions are not surprising, given the nature of the case: no previous President has been charged with a criminal offense. It’s a modern equivalent of Tutankhamun’s tomb. 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. Lefkowitz State Office Building, on Centre Street. 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. 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. 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. After Vance’s victory at the Supreme Court, he released a typically buttoned-up statement: “The work continues.” 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. ![]() ![]() Instead, he went to extraordinary lengths to hide the documents. 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. 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. Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he has been waging a ferocious battle. 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. 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. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for nearly a decade’s worth of private financial records, including his tax returns. 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. ![]() 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.
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