Yesterday we reported that since Bob Mueller has delivered his report to William Barr, the fight against Donald Trump and his criminal family and businesses will move to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York (SDNY).
Robert Mueller apparently will not indict anyone else, but Democratic leaders in Congress made very clear that they are expecting additional indictments from other sources.
Mueller has already handed off high profile federal criminal cases to the SDNY. For example, when Robert Mueller investigated Michael Cohen he determined that Cohen didn’t commit crimes central to the Trump-Russia election scandal, but he did commit other Trump-related crimes. So he then referred the case to the SDNY, which had jurisdiction over those crimes, for prosecution.
SDNY then brought the criminal case against Cohen, and now he’s going to prison.
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When he handed the Cohen case to the Feds at SDNY they kept it secret. The public didn’t find out about it until SDNY was ready to indict him.
Mueller didn’t even “recommend” to SDNY that Cohen be indicted. He just gave them the case and let them make the decision based on the evidence.
So we’ve already seen Mueller send one of Trump’s people to prison without indicting him or recommending that he be indicted.
We’ve learned that he’s also handed off cases and evidence to six other federal prosecutorial entities. And we’ll see more announcements about those cases at a later time.
What Will Happen to Trump’s Family?
The big question now of course is what’s going to happen to Donald Trump’s family.
We’ve already received a big clue about this from Paul Manafort’s case.
New York State waited until the minute Paul Manafort’s federal case was over, then immediately unsealed indictments against him. Waiting was a way of keeping the prosecution clean, even though New York had been sitting on the Manafort indictments for a long time.
We know that New York State has been investigating Trump’s business, charity and children for a long time also. And it is likely they have obtained sealed indictments, and when the federal cases are over they will unseal the indictments, like they did with Manafort.
If the SDNY wasn’t planning to indict anyone in Donald Trump’s family, we’d have seen New York State move forward with the indictments they are planning to bring.
But New York State is still waiting. They are waiting for the SDNY to indict and prosecute Trump’s family first – just like they did with Manafort.
New York Attorney General Tish James promised, after being elected on November 6, that she would begin large-scale investigations of “President Donald Trump, his family and anyone in his circle who may have violated the law.”
James said the investigations and prosecutions of Trump criminal conduct would be a top priority after she took office. For a long time New York States been aggressively investigating the Trump businesses and family members for their alleged crimes. The fact that no indictments of Trump’s children have yet been unsealed is very strong evidence that New York State is waiting for the SDNY to finish their business.
Which means that indictments of Trump’s family will probably be coming very soon.
I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.
