Pomerantz, according to his book about the case, surmised that they (1) were abiding by the DOJ’s guidance against indicting a sitting president and (2) had such a difficult relationship with Cohen, who was never offered a formal cooperating witness deal, that they didn’t want to rely on him as a witness. Learn more: But SDNY never pursued a case against Trump. passenger airline industry is significantly outpacing overall U.S.

That’s thousands of new jobs – pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and others – every month. Last year alone, airlines helped 50,000 new careers take flight. It “now leaves little doubt that faces criminal prosecution after he leaves office for the same offenses for which Cohen will serve time,” BOB BAUER, now President JOE BIDEN’s personal lawyer, told the NYT in 2019.ĭid you know? Every day more than 780,000 workers in America make our industry go. When all of this was disclosed back then, it was common for legal pundits to assume that the guy who SDNY said directed this illegal scheme was guilty of the same crime. In the sentencing memorandum written after Cohen pleaded guilty, the feds said Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump (who was thinly disguised as “Individual-1”). In 2018, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unraveled the entire affair, charging Cohen with, among other things, making illegal federal campaign contributions. The Trump Organization recorded the payments as “legal expenses.” While in the White House, Trump personally signed the reimbursement checks to Cohen throughout 2017. Cohen then billed Trump to reimburse him. Some basic facts are not in dispute: Cohen took out a home equity loan to pay Daniels the $130K. The case started as a federal criminal probe of MICHAEL COHEN, Trump’s longtime fixer.

When he started the job in early 2021, Pomerantz first dug into the hush money payments because, he later wrote, “it was interesting and easy to understand,” unlike the complicated financial investigation of the Trump Organization that would later become his focus. It was dead and then brought back to life by MARK POMERANTZ, who led the Manhattan DA’s Trump investigation. In 2021, inside the Manhattan DA’s office, then run by CY VANCE, the Daniels saga was known as the “zombie” case. To understand how one of the OG Trump scandals returned from the dead to ensnare Trump seven years after Daniels got her $130,000, we need to review the case’s complicated history. The return of the hush money caper to the white-hot center of American politics has a lot of people scratching their heads and puzzling over some basic questions: Of all the Trump scandals, why is this the one that’s going to get him arrested? Didn’t authorities already rule out any culpability for Trump in that case? And isn’t Bragg’s legal theory hopelessly flawed? Specifically, Bragg is apparently preparing to argue that Trump created fictitious records during the scheme to pay off STORMY DANIELS in October 2016 after she threatened to expose their alleged affair. While we don’t know for sure what crime - or crimes - that Manhattan DA ALVIN BRAGG will allege, the weight of available evidence suggests Trump will be charged with violating a New York state law against falsifying business records. The grand jury hearing the case meets again tomorrow. 6 continue, it is the Manhattan probe that is set to produce the first Trump indictment, as soon as this week. More than two years later, while state and federal criminal investigations into Trump’s culpability for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, as pro-Trump rioters were ransacking the Capitol in Washington, prosecutors in Manhattan gathered on Zoom to discuss Trump’s bookkeeping practices. UNDERSTANDING THE TRUMP ‘ZOMBIE’ CASE - On the afternoon of Jan. While he did not rule out looking at KUSHNER’s business dealings at some point, ‌when a reporter suggested it might be politically unsustainable for him to investigate TRUMP’s son-in-law, he took a long pause, then replied: ‘I don’t disagree with what you said.’” JUST POSTED - “Comer, Republicans’ Investigative Chief, Embraces Role of Biden Antagonist,” by NYT’s Jonathan Swan and Luke Broadwater: “The fourth-term Kentuckian and chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has become an aggressive promoter of sinister-sounding claims about the president and his family.”Įyes emoji: “ COMER indicated he had no interest in the former president’s finances. | Wesley Parnell for POLITICO DRIVING THE DAY While we don’t know for sure what crime that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will allege, the weight of available evidence suggests Donald Trump will be charged with violating a New York state law against falsifying business records.

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