The Daily Parker

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The walls close in a little

The New York Attorney General's office has tightened the screws on the Trump Organization:

"We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. 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," Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.

James' years-long probe into Trump's charitable foundation led to its dissolution in 2018. More recently, her investigation into whether Trump's business had inflated the value of its assets for the purposes of tax breaks and loans came to a head in October when Eric Trump, the president's son and an executive at his business, sat for a pre-election deposition.

Aaron Blake speculates on what this could mean:

Perhaps the most significant consensus among former New York state prosecutors I reached out to is that it makes some kind of criminal charges appear more likely than previously known. That doesn’t mean those charges will definitely come or implicate the former president personally. But it’s the kind of statement that James’s office would have known full well would land with some force — and potentially create an expectation about where all this will lead.

Tax fraud would seem to potentially come into play here, given the extensive New York Times investigation into tax schemes Trump engaged in as far back as the 1990s — schemes the Times went as far as to say included “instances of outright fraud.” But the report also noted that much of what it described happened too long ago for criminal charges to be brought.

It’s also fair to ask why this statement was made public. Prosecutors generally don’t disclose such things and will wait for actual charges to be brought before publicly commenting. But in a high-profile case such as this, the former prosecutors say, it was potentially only a matter of time before such a phase of the investigation would be known publicly. The attorney general’s office notified the Trump Organization of the new phase last month, The Washington Post’s Shayna Jacobs and David A. Fahrenthold report.

I've consistently said I don't expect to see the XPOTUS behind bars, nor do I want that outcome. I think it sets a scary precedent for any democracy to jail a former head of government for anything short of violent crime. Don Junior, Jared, and Melania, however, should spend some time in Danbury. The New York AG and New York County DA may well send them to Queensboro instead.

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