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By Makini Brice and Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Since taking office in January 2017, President Donald Trump has been besieged by civil lawsuits and criminal investigations from his inner circle.
With Democrat Joe Biden assuming the presidency on Saturday, according to major US television networks, Trump’s legal troubles are likely to deepen because in January he will lose the protections that the US legal system provides to a sitting president. , said former prosecutors.
These are some of the lawsuits and criminal investigations that may haunt Trump when he leaves office.
A NEW YORK ATTORNEY
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who enforces New York State laws, has been conducting a criminal investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization for more than two years.
The investigation originally focused on secret money payments that former Trump attorney and self-described repairman Michael Cohen paid before the 2016 election to two women who said they had had sexual encounters with Trump, which the president has denied.
Vance, a Democrat, has suggested in recent court filings that his investigation is now broader and could focus on bank, tax and insurance fraud, as well as falsification of business records.
Republican Trump has called Vance’s case politically motivated harassment.
The case has drawn attention due to Vance’s efforts to obtain eight years of tax returns from Trump. In July, the US Supreme Court, denying Trump’s attempt to keep the remarks secret, said the president was not immune from state criminal investigations while in office, but that he could raise other defenses to Vance’s summons.
Vance is likely to eventually prevail in obtaining Trump’s financial records, legal experts said.
The United States Department of Justice has said that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Vance is not subject to that policy because he is not a federal prosecutor, but he may still have been reluctant to impeach Trump due to uncertainty about whether the case was constitutional, said Harry Sandick, a former New York prosecutor.
“Those concerns will go away when Trump leaves office,” Sandick said.
The investigation poses a threat to Trump, said Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown University.
“The fact that they have issued the subpoenas and have litigated up to the Supreme Court suggests that this is a very serious criminal investigation of the president,” Brettschneider said.
PROBE FROM THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT?
Trump may face criminal prosecution initiated by the United States Department of Justice, led by a new United States Attorney General.
Some legal experts have said Trump could face charges for federal income tax evasion, pointing to a New York Times report that Trump paid $ 750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017.
“You have the material that has come out of the New York Times that has all kinds of indications of tax fraud,” said Nick Akerman, attorney for Dorsey & Whitney and former federal prosecutor.
Akerman cautioned that it is not possible to know for sure until you see all the evidence.
Trump has rejected the findings of the Times report, tweeting that he had paid many millions of dollars in taxes, but was entitled to depreciation and tax credits.
Such a prosecution would be deeply controversial, and the Justice Department could decide that indicting Trump is not in the public interest, even if there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Biden has approached that question very carefully, saying it would not interfere with his Justice Department’s judgment.
Biden told National Public Radio in August that bringing criminal charges against his predecessor would be “something very, very unusual and probably not very, how can I put it – good for democracy.”
An attorney for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
NEW YORK CIVIL FRAUD INVESTIGATION
New York Attorney General Letitia James has an active tax fraud investigation into Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization.
The investigation into James, a Democrat, began after Trump’s former attorney, Cohen, told Congress that the president inflated asset values to save money on loans and insurance and deflated them to lower property taxes.
The Trump Organization has argued that the case is politically motivated.
The inquiry is a civil investigation, which means it could result in financial penalties but not imprisonment.
Trump’s son, Eric Trump, the firm’s executive vice president, was deposed in October because of what the attorney general described as his close involvement in one or more transactions under review.
E. JEAN CARROLL
E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine writer, sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after the president denied Carroll’s accusation that he raped her in the 1990s at a New York department store and accused her of lying. to increase the sales of a book.
In August, a state judge allowed the case to go ahead, meaning that Carroll’s attorneys could search for a sample of Trump’s DNA to compare to a dress she said she was wearing at the store.
A federal judge in Manhattan rejected an offer from the US Department of Justice to replace Trump with the federal government as a defendant in the case. US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said Trump did not comment on Carroll in the area of his employment as president.
Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said she hoped Biden’s Justice Department would drop the effort to protect Trump from the case.
“It seems unlikely that the Justice Department will continue what I see as a frivolous argument in a new administration,” said McQuade, a former federal prosecutor.
SUMMER ZERVOS
Trump is also facing a lawsuit from Summer Zervos, a 2005 contestant on Trump’s reality television show “The Apprentice,” who says Trump kissed her against her will in a 2007 meeting and then touched her at a hotel.
After Trump called Zervos a liar, she sued him for defamation.
Trump said he is immune from the lawsuit because he is president.
The case https://de.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-zervos/trump-fails-to-end-apprentice-contestants-lawsuit-idINL1N21115J has been on hold while a New York State appeals court reviewed a March 2019 decision that Trump had to face the case while in office. Trump’s immunity argument would no longer apply once he’s out of office.
(This story was resubmitted to insert first reference to New York department stores, paragraph 32)
(Reporting by Makini Brice and Jan Wolfe; Edited by Noeleen Walder and Grant McCool)
