The Manhattan District Attorney all but confirmed on Friday that it is investigating President Trump for more than the 2016 hush money scheme involving Michael Cohen.
“Given that this much information about potentially widespread and protracted criminal conduct was in the public record (and without going into any additional, nonpublic sources), it is not plausible to speculate, let alone infer, that the grand jury investigation was limited to Cohen’s 2016 payments,” attorneys for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance wrote in a Friday court filing.
The statement comes after Vance suggested on Aug. 3 that he was probing the Trump organization for fraud, citing multiple news reports purporting to document a pattern by which Trump would interfere with the book value of his assets in representations to lenders and insurers.
Trump hit back at that on Monday, arguing that the subpoena was still too broad as it exceeded the parameters for the stated origin of the investigation: the Trump org’s role in a scheme to buy the silence of women who said they had affairs with the President.
The arguments come after Trump spent a year fighting a subpoena obtained by the Manhattan DA for his financial records, including tax returns, arguing that his status as President made him “immune from criminal process.”
That line of thinking reached its logical endpoint in appeals arguments last year, when an attorney for Trump told a panel of appellate judges that the police could not investigate President Trump were he to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue while in office.
The Supreme Court roundly dismissed that argument last month, but gave Trump leave to raise further arguments against the subpoenas at the district court level.
Vance attempted in the Friday filing to shoot those arguments down, arguing that it was unreasonable for the President to make broad claims about Vance’s probe based off of one grand jury subpoena.
“But singling out one particular subpoena, and declaring that it must necessarily define and delimit the scope of a grand jury’s inquiry, makes no sense at all, particularly in a months-long financial investigation,” Vance wrote.
The Manhattan DA reiterated in the filing that the probe extends beyond the 2016 hush money scandal.
“Plaintiff has been put on notice repeatedly throughout this litigation that the investigation was not limited to Cohen’s 2016 payments,” prosecutors wrote.
Read the filing here:
