New York attorney general Letitia James is no stranger to pressing the Trump family’s buttons. For a couple of years now, her office has been investigating some of the Trump family’s dubious real estate “deals.” Donald Trump’s inherited wealth is suspected to have been mostly squandered by The Donald himself, and he is believed to have subsequently involved himself in the bouillabaisse of corruption and shadiness of our unregulated economic system. This system of failing upward for the born rich extends to the wildly unimpressive Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. As a result, the Trump children have found themselves being forced to fight against, and end up giving, depositions to the various investigators from myriad jurisdictions.
On Monday, the New York Times reports that the attorney general’s office is looking into speaking with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump. According to court documents, Donald, Ivanka, and Junior were all subpoenaed by Attorney General James’ office in a court filing on Dec. 1. It was known that James had subpoenaed Donald Trump but the fact that Ivanka and Junior would have to take a break from whatever they do to speak with investigators is fresh news indeed.
The subpoenas set a timer on the Trump family’s response, and according to ABC News, Ivanka and Junior plan to dispute them.
Eric and Junior, along with Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, technically took over the Trump business when Donald became the unpopular 2016 president of the United States. Eric Trump already sat for a deposition by James’ office in October of 2020, after trying to dodge the law for a few months.
This summer, the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, were charged with more than a dozen felony counts relating to organized-crime-style “off the books,” tax fraud schemes.
Attorney General James’ inquiry is a civil one, focused specifically on whether or not Donald Trump “fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to secure bank loans and understated them elsewhere to reduce his tax bill.”
The Trump Organization has been described as a “criminal conspiracy,” under oath, by former Trump confidant and lawyer, Michael Cohen. Donald Junior’s deposition in D.C. only served to “raise further questions,” concerning the unscrupulous nature of the family business.
Ivanka Trump has long been able to skate past charges, balancing a self-promotion brand of being a whip-smart businesswoman with an absolute naive dunderhead. Most experts believe it is only a matter of time before investigators collect the concrete receipts needed to get her charged.
The fact that the entire Trump clan is being brought in for a reckoning adds more context to Trump’s predictable move to sue the attorney general to end her civil investigation a couple of weeks after this filing. James’ response to that was, “Neither Mr. Trump nor the Trump Organization gets to dictate if and where they will answer for their actions.”
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
