There's less hope

A follow-up to our previous story, by way of the superb Sarah Kendzior:

The Manhattan DA who subpoenaed Trump's taxes is Cy Vance. Vance is known for protecting elite criminals. Among those he aided are Weinstein, Epstein, Strauss-Kahn, and Donald Jr and Ivanka Trump. Temper your expectations.

Vance appears multiple times in my upcoming book, which spans decades, just like Vance's contribution to a culture of elite criminal impunity!

Y'know, if George Soros really were what the right imagines him to be, he'd find some way to top Trump's bribe, if Trump has offered one. 

But if Vance is going to kill this thing, why did the subpoena even happen?

The New Yorker was all over this story two years ago. October 4, 2017:

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.

Ivanka might have spent some time in a new vacation spot where her wardrobe would have been as orange as her father's face. Ah, but then Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz entered the scene. He had donated $25,000 to Vance's re-election effort -- not an overwhelmingly huge sum, but it seems to have made an impression.

On May 16, 2012, Kasowitz visited Vance’s office at One Hogan Place, in downtown Manhattan—a faded edifice made famous by the television show “Law & Order.” Dan Alonso, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, and Adam Kaufmann, the chief of the investigative division, were also at the meeting, but no one from the Major Economic Crimes Bureau attended. Kasowitz did not introduce any new arguments or facts during his session. He simply repeated the arguments that the other defense lawyers had been making for months.

Ultimately, Vance overruled his own prosecutors. Three months after the meeting, he told them to drop the case. Kasowitz subsequently boasted to colleagues about representing the Trump children, according to two people. He said that the case was “really dangerous,” one person said, and that it was “amazing I got them off.” (Kasowitz denied making such a statement.)

Larger donations followed. Vance and Kasowitz denied a quid pro quo.

The Trump SoHo project involved Felix Sater, whose ties to the Russian criminal underworld (or should that be overworld?) were discussed in many previous posts, and Tevfik Arif, who went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the world knows that he had nothing to do with underaged prostitutes being used to blackmail VIPs. So whatever you do, don't accuse him of that.

Also: Any suggestion that Vance might be caught up in a kompromat operation would be completely irresponsible, so don't even let that thought enter your head.

Nevertheless, I must ask: Have you noticed any right-wingers subjecting Vance to character assassination? There's really only one way to tell whether Vance is honest: If the InfoWars/Fox/Breitbart crowd continually screams "He's no good!" -- he's good. But if they don't go after Vance, he's dirty.

I'm serious. That's the only way to know.

The New Yorker published a follow-up piece on Vance on October 13.