President Donald Trump and the Trump Organization are being investigated by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. for bank and insurance fraud, according to a court filing Monday.
The legal filing with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan wants Trump's longtime accounting firm, Mazars LLC, to provide the District Attorney's office with up to a decade's worth of Trump's financial records to see if they contain evidence of other "potentially improper financial transactions by a variety of individuals and entities over a period of years."
Vance's office said at the time the Mazars subpoena was issued in August 2019, "there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff's New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade."
It did not, however, explicitly say what it's probing. This new investigation is in addition to the current probe into Trump's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, among others.
The filing also said the allegations describe transactions "involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York's borders."
Vance's office also said this new probe might result in "a favorable outcome ... substantially related to ... among other things, 'alleged insurance and bank fraud by the Trump Organization and its officers.'"
This new probe was triggered back in February 2019 when Trump's former friend, fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, told the House Oversight Committee that Trump had inflated his net worth to convince banks to loan him millions of dollars and deflated his assets to pay lower real estate taxes to New York State. Cohen also revealed Trump directed him to make the hush-money payments to Daniels and other women during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
"It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes," Cohen said at the time.
Cohen is currently in prison serving the last two years of a three-year sentence in home confinement. He pled guilty to violating campaign finance laws and lying to Congress.
The White House and the Trump Organization have yet to comment on Vance's latest filing. Trump on Monday branded Vance's new probe a witch hunt.
In August 2019, Vance's office issued a subpoena to Mazars for eight years of Trump's individual tax returns, as well as corporate tax records for the Trump Organization.
In October, Judge Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected Trump's attempt to prevent his tax returns from being turned over to the New York grand jury. He ordered Trump to comply with Vance's subpoena.
Trump then filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, claiming the grand-jury subpoena violates Article II and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. Last July 9, the Supreme Court issued it 7-2 ruling stating Trump has no absolute immunity from the New York grand jury criminal subpoenas.
