Vance’s Trump case is straight from a banana republic, punish your political enemies

D

Drummie123

Verified User
OPINION

Cy Vance’s Trump case is straight from a banana republic — punish your political enemies

By Dan McLaughlin

July 1, 2021 | 6:20pm | Updated

cy-vance.jpg

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance arrives at Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg's arraignment hearing on July 1, 2021.REUTERS



Donald Trump has long claimed that investigations of him are a partisan “witch hunt.” Manhattan DA Cy Vance seems determined to make Trump’s point for him by indicting the Trump Organization along with its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.

The 15-count indictment throws a kitchen sink of charges, including grand larceny, conspiracy, scheme to defraud,and tax fraud. But the whole thing comes down to paying perks to Weisselberg — such as his parking garage fees, tuition for family members and reimbursement of holiday gratuities — and not reporting them as taxable income, or reporting that the wrong Trump entity paid them.

For this they slapped Weisselberg in handcuffs Thursday and paraded him in front of the media — a stage-managed political show trial.


Corporations almost never get criminally prosecuted for this sort of thing, but Vance wanted the name “Trump” in his indictment. You can bet that he would have indicted The Donald if he had the goods. The feds — who’ve been auditing Trump’s taxes forever — haven’t filed charges.


Equal justice under law means the same law for everyone. That is violated not only when we give powerful people a pass in cases that would get ordinary people locked up, but also when prominent figures get pursued over things that would never get a normal person prosecuted.

Attorney General Robert Jackson, later a Supreme Court justice and Nuremberg prosecutor, warned against “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him,” in which case “the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”


True in 1940, true in 2021.

Don’t prosecute your enemies under rules you would not want used against your friends. If Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, Vance would have a duty to prosecute him. But trumped-up charges against former leaders are a familiar sight in banana republics. America has thus far avoided that. Making a precedent of this kind of case, based on aggressive readings of the law or its extension to situations rarely prosecuted, is a perilous step.

Vance seems to think he’s Eliot Ness getting Al Capone for tax fraud by nabbing his accountant. But if Weisselberg isn’t going to testify that his boss did something criminal, it’s Trump who will come out looking untouchable.
Click to expand...


https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/cy-vances-trump-case-is-straight-from-a-banana-republic/
 
‘Crimes’ Against Trump Organization “Rarely Criminal” – No One Criminally Charged with These ‘Crimes’ Last Year!

By Joe Hoft
Published July 1, 2021 at 3:35pm

Bogus charges against Trump Organization and its CFO rarely become criminal charges – for example, there were no taxable-fringe-benefit charges against anyone in 2020 per preliminary review per MSNBC!

This is a radical biased and corrupt DA gone bad. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance should be the one arraigned today.




Mark Finkelstein
@markfinkelstein
Vendetta by Dem DA? ��

"Not sure ANY taxable-fringe-benefit cases brought in federal court last year. Doesn't become CRIMINAL case very often."—MSNBC legal analyst @CevallosLaw on charges against Trump organization

@MorningMika left speechless! ����

#tcot #Trump @Morning_Joe
Click to expand...

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/20...l-no-one-criminally-charged-crimes-last-year/
 
Blaze Media / News


Manhattan prosecutors consider 'highly unusual' criminal charges against Trump Organization


CHRIS PANDOLFO

June 25, 2021

iu

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump's lawyers were informed Friday that the Manhattan district attorney's office is considering criminal charges against the Trump Organization related to fringe benefits the company awarded a top executive, the New York Times reported.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who has led a three-year probe into Trump's business dealings with assistance from New York Attorney General Letitia James' office, could file the charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg as early as next week, if he chooses to seek an indictment.

The potential charges would include whether Trump's company properly recorded and paid taxes on benefits Weisselberg and other executives received, like tens of thousands of dollars in private school tuition for one of his grandchildren, rents on apartments, and car leases.

According to the Times, prosecutors have been building a case against Weisselberg for months in an attempt to pressure him to cooperate with the investigation into the former president. As a longtime Trump Organization employee, Weisselberg is assumed to have inside knowledge about Trump's dealings that could prove useful to investigators seeking to prove that the former president or his employees committed a crime.

If Vance proceeds, these would be the first criminal charges filed against Trump's company in the course of the Southern District of New York's highly publicized investigation into Trump and his business dealings.

Trump's lawyers reportedly met with prosecutors Thursday in an attempt to persuade them to abandon plans to drag the Trump Organization to court over what may be a trivial matter. Legal experts specializing in tax law told the Times that it would be "highly unusual to indict a company just for failing to pay taxes on fringe benefits." None of the experts could cite a recent example of another company facing similar charges over perks like company cars.

"Still, an indictment of Mr. Trump's company could deal a significant blow to the former president just as he has flirted with a return to politics," the Times acknowledged, a point Trump will doubtlessly use in his longstanding and ongoing complaints that the investigation into his businesses led by Vance, a Democrat, is a partisan "witch hunt."

After the Times published its report, Trump's lawyer, Ronald Fischetti, blasted the potential charges in a statement to NBC News after noting that "there are no charges that are going to be leveled against Mr. Trump himself."

"The corporate office will plead not guilty and we will make an immediate motion to dismiss the case against the corporation," Fischetti said. "Mr. Trump is outraged that they are still going after him by going after his company where he has loyal employees for decades.

"It looks like they are going to come down with charges against the company and that is completely outrageous," Fischetti said. "I've been practicing for over 50 years and I've never seen a case like this where they would indict or charge an individual or a company on tax evasion for using a company car or company apartment and then tie it to the company that he is working for without any evidence that what he did benefited the company."

Fischetti said New York prosecutors were persecuting Weisselberg because he would not turn on Trump.

"They could not get Allen Weisselberg to cooperate and tell them what they wanted to hear and that's why they are going forward with these charges," Fischetti said. "And they could not get him to cooperate because he would not say that Donald Trump had knowledge or any information that he may have been not deducting properly the use of cars or an apartment."

Last month, District Attorney Vance convened a grand jury to review the evidence from his investigation into Trump's business dealings and decide whether to indict the former president. It is unclear if more potential criminal charges will be announced against the Trump Organization or the former president.
Click to expand...

https://www.theblaze.com/news/manha...y-unusual-criminal-charges-trump-organization


District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. led a three-year probe into Trump's business dealings with assistance from New York Attorney General Letitia James' office, and after all that time were only able to bring charges related to fringe benefits the company awarded a single top executive, the New York Times reported.


chickenshit chĭk′ən-shĭt″►
n. Contemptibly petty, insignificant nonsense.

Those who are salivating at these allegations or legal proceedings are like dogs who eat chicken shit.

iu



.
 
Last edited:
Drummie123 said:
https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/cy-vances-trump-case-is-straight-from-a-banana-republic/
Click to expand...

The left is determined to indict someone named Trump lol.

With ‘determined’ being the key concept. They literally are never going to stop. They investigated this thing for how long and probably spent millions doing it? All for an ‘indictment’ over something that usually results in either a fine or simply a correction on your taxes? And ‘they can’t find anything’ on Hunter Biden?

It’s a joke. But that’s ok, the double standard is plenty apparent to all but the Trump haters.
 
Darth Omar said:
The left is determined to indict someone named Trump lol.

With ‘determined’ being the key concept. They literally are never going to stop. They investigated this thing for how long and probably spent millions doing it? All for an ‘indictment’ over something that usually results in either a fine or simply a correction on your taxes? And ‘they can’t find anything’ on Hunter Biden?

It’s a joke. But that’s ok, the double standard is plenty apparent to all but the Trump haters.
Click to expand...

15 counts of criminal fraud.
 
Darth Omar said:
The left is determined to indict someone named Trump lol.

With ‘determined’ being the key concept. They literally are never going to stop. They investigated this thing for how long and probably spent millions doing it? All for an ‘indictment’ over something that usually results in either a fine or simply a correction on your taxes? And ‘they can’t find anything’ on Hunter Biden?

It’s a joke. But that’s ok, the double standard is plenty apparent to all but the Trump haters.
Click to expand...

"This is no mere fringe benefits case" but rather a "straight-out fraud case, claiming that the defendants kept double books: phony ones to show the tax authorities, and accurate ones to be hidden from view.

Suppose that your employer pays you monthly, through automatically deposited paychecks that end up being included on your annual W-2. But suppose that each month you could stop by the front office, request an envelope full of cash in unmarked bills, and have your W-2 reduced accordingly. So your true income would be the same as if you hadn't stopped by, but you'd be reporting less salary. If your employer kept careful records of all the cash it gave you, and also still deducted it all, we would basically have this case. That is far different from simple failure to pay taxes on fringe benefits, which is how the indictment has been widely misunderstood, thanks in part to Trump's defense lawyers' laying the groundwork before the charges were made public on Thursday."

The items Weisselberg received that were funded by the company "had no relationship whatsoever to the sort of items that, under appropriate circumstances, might potentially constitute tax-free employee fringe benefits.
 
“You’ve got to get behind somebody’s mind. Did they understand what they were doing?” said Philip Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who previously worked in the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel.

Hackney said that — if prosecutors are accurately describing the Trump Organization’s internal spreadsheets — those records would be strong evidence that Weisselberg knew the untaxed payments were income. “You’ve got a physical manifestation of knowledge,” he said. “Which is a pretty uncommon thing to have.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...df06f0-db81-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top