The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R Vance Jr, refused on Saturday to answer questions about contributions to his re-election campaign and decisions to quash a fraud investigation involving Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr and not to prosecute the movie producer Harvey Weinstein over an alleged groping incident.
Vance, who will be up for re-election in November, was a speaker at a pro-gun control event in Union Square in New York City, held in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting. Asked about the campaign contributions, he offered no comment and swiftly left the event.
On Wednesday, ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker reported that between 2010 and 2012, prosecutors attempted to build a case against the two Trump siblings for allegedly “misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development”.
Before meeting Vance about the case in May 2012, the report said, Donald Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz donated $25,000 to the DA’s re-election campaign. Vance returned the donation, according to what he said was standard practice when a donor has a case before his office.
Three months later, the case was dropped. Vance told the three media outlets that was the “right call”, as he “did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed”.
Subsequent donations to Vance’s campaign by Kasowitz and organised through him, and in excess of $50,000, were accepted. Speaking to ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker, Vance said he would return that money. He also said Kasowitz “had no influence, and his contributions had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case”.
[...] In Union Square on Saturday a spokeswoman, Joan Vollero, [...] said in her emailed statement: “This was a two-year investigation that never produced sufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution. During the investigation, the luxury apartment purchasers reversed course and took the position that the sellers had not committed any crime against them. No outside attorney influenced any decision in this matter.”
Whether a civil suit settles or not seems irrelevant to whether a crime was committed. Emphasizing that the civil suit plaintiffs settled seems a non sequitur. Kiting facts about unit sales in a housing development, with emails apparently exchanged, seems suspect beyond a sentence or two about plaintiffs in something apart from a prosecutor deciding to prosecute or not, where evidence might have been presented a grand jury to decide whether a crime existed. And with the prosecutor controlling any grand jury proceeding, is it moot that the prosecutor just dropped things in the middle of things? Vance has this in his portfolio of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Justice may be blind while holding the scales; but people can be human in many ways.