BREAKING: NY AG Takes Action Against Trump Family

we have some breaking news moments ago new york attorney general leticia james posted on twitter we are taking legal action to force donald trump donald trump jr and ivanka trump to comply with our investigation into the trump organization's financial dealings i want to welcome back daniel goldman former assistant united states attorney for the southern district of new york he also served as general counsel for the house intelligence committee during the first trump impeachment uh i don't know if you've had a chance daniel this is brand new information to go through the reporting on this but it does seem that the attorney general of new york state um is is making the case that donald trump donald trump jr and ivanka trump provided misleading financial representations to institutions that the former president had ultimate authority over a wide swath of conduct by the trump organization involving misstatements to counterparties including financial institutions and the intel internal revenue uh service what do you make of this if you've had a chance to look at it what's new in here and important well what's new is some details about what her civil investigation relates to we've known there's been an ongoing civil investigation into the trump organization in the attorney general's office which is separate and parallel to the criminal investigation that the attorney general is involved with as well as the manhattan da's office who's leading that investigation and it was certainly around the trump organization's uh finances but now what we are learning from this filing in this press release tonight is that the the allegations are that donald trump donald trump jr and ivanka trump were very involved in exaggerating or misstating statements of assets and finances in order to obtain loans insurance and tax credits and to over inflate the value of various properties there's been some suspicion since michael cohen's testimony in the house almost two years ago that this is the investigation michael cohen said that the trump organization would inflate the valuations of some of their assets in order to get larger loans but then deflate those same assets in order to pay fewer taxes so what we are now learning is that the new york attorney general's office is indeed investigating that as part of the civil investigation and is seeking to force the former president his son donald jr and ivanka trump to sit for depositions those three had already filed a motion to quash the subpoenas in court and the attorney general is now responding to those motions in this court filing there are it's it's a lot of reading for people who are interested in this sort of thing there's a lot of detail in here as to what they allege the misstatements were there there there are a lot of them but one of the more interesting things here is that we know that these allegations go back sometime and the attorney general of new york relates to things going back to at least 2004 but what's most interesting is that he discusses the fact that until 2017 uh the former president had had sway over some of these decisions and then since 2017 ivanka trump was the main conduit so the the issue at hand here is uh how close or how far the former president was to the more contemporary of these allegations letting alone uh the stuff that we know about or or we believe to know about uh that was that's a little bit older yeah from the little that i've been able to read in the last couple minutes it does appear that the allegations that i've seen at least are the that the former president's role in overseeing these statements and certifying these statements uh ended around the time that he took over and donald trump jr largely took over while ivanka trump handled the relationship with deutsche bank but what's interesting is that deutsche bank is also one of the banks that is alleged to have potentially been defrauded and the key conduit at deutsche bank is a woman named rosemary vlablic or vreiblick i should say who uh our at least i think there's been some public reporting that she has met with investigators uh to explain the at least her side of the story deutsche bank side of the story so there certainly is a lot of information that is available to the attorney general some of the trump organizations accountants at mazars also has been in front of the investigators the interesting thing and this is a little inside baseball alley is it's unusual to be pushing so hard on a civil investigation that has a parallel criminal investigation you cannot use a civil investigation as a stalking horse to develop evidence that you could then use in a criminal investigation and that's one of the arguments that the trump's lawyers make for why these subpoenas and for depositions are inappropriate now and it is a legitimate argument so it will be interesting to see uh how this plays out going forward the the trump uh legal team prior to tonight had addressed this issue in which they said the state attorney general referring to letitia james is engaged in a criminal investigation that has an active grand jury it cannot issue subpoenas for testimony under the guise of a civil investigation that will immediately become available to its own criminal investigations the lawyers argued in their motion to quash the subpoenas they continued the subpoenas are an obvious improper end run around the rules so let's talk about the fact that this is a civil investigation that that ledition james is talking about what are the potential penalties for something like this versus a criminal investigation well the primary penalty is is money damages in a in a civil investigation there are ways depending on the types of organizations that uh the the organization or the entity would have to be reformed reshaped or there may be punishments in terms of being a director for some individuals that happens more with charitable organizations which is what happened with the trump foundation you may recall allie that the new york attorney general sought to dissolve the trump foundation because it was essentially being used as a slush fund not for the purpose that it was designed for and the board of directors of that trump foundation which were the children of donald trump were prohibited from being a board member for any charitable organization uh for a number of years so there can be penalties depending on what type of organization there is but primarily it will be fines and damages that by the way could be a lot of money and could have a significant impact on the uh ability of and a corporation or an entity such as the trump organization to continue opera depending on how significant i'm back i might have lost there looks like our internet might have just run out of juice but we appreciate daniel goldman sticking around for us to help us analyze [Music] you

Channel: MSNBC

Views: 813,081

Keywords: Brian Williams, donald trump, ivanka trump, letitia james, new york attorney general, new york, trump organization, msnbc, news

Id: excnrnve1l4

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022