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A New York district attorney has given former President Donald Trump a smidge of good legal news for a change. According to Business Insider, the Westchester County district attorney’s office closed its investigation into The Trump Organization and the former president himself earlier this month without filing any charges.
“District Attorney Mimi Rocah closed the investigation earlier in June,” the outlet reported, citing a source familiar with the investigation.
According to a source who is not authorized to speak on the record, Elliott Jacobson, a special prosecutor appointed by Rocah, left the office in late 2022. The source reveals that Jacobson determined that the evidence gathered during the investigation did not substantiate criminal charges, involved conduct outside the statute of limitations, or duplicated ongoing investigations by other law enforcement authorities, the outlet reported.
The New York attorney general’s office assumed jurisdiction over a significant portion of the material. While the district attorney’s office is limited to pursuing criminal cases, the attorney general’s office possesses the authority to initiate civil lawsuits, Insider noted.
The outlet added:
New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a blockbuster civil lawsuit against the Trump Organization in September, which is scheduled to go to trial this October.
The district attorney’s office in Westchester — a county north of New York City — opened the investigation two years ago. It examined whether the former president’s family business illegally misled authorities about the value of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to pay lower property taxes. For years leading up to the criminal investigation, the village of Ossining had been entangled in civil litigation with the club over the property’s true value and appropriate tax bill, court records reviewed by Insider show.
In 2021, the office issued subpoenas for financial records from the golf course, as reported by the New York Times. However, details about the investigation have been limited in the years following. The source familiar with the case revealed that the investigation later broadened to include the former president’s personal conduct in the assessment of the golf club’s value.
Rocah’s office encountered overlapping investigations into the Trump Organization, including a long-standing examination by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into the company’s financial matters. The district attorney’s office had been delving into the organization’s finances for an extended period, even resorting to legal battles that reached the Supreme Court on two occasions in order to obtain tax records.
“Manhattan prosecutors brought criminal charges against the company and then-CFO Allen Weisselberg in the summer of 2021, alleging they falsified tax payroll tax records, and won at trial last fall,” Insider noted.
In May, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump on 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records related to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump sent a payment to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, allegedly to keep her quiet about an affair the two of them had in 2006.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges, and the case is being panned by prominent figures as being weak and politically motivated.
Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz is among the experts who have expressed skepticism of the legal grounds supporting Bragg’s case, saying he is using “made-up laws” to muster a politically motivated attack.
“Nobody should ever be arrested based on made-up laws or combining a federal and state statute,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times in an interview in March when news broke that Trump could be criminally charged. “I taught criminal law for 50 years at Harvard, and the one rule was, no creativity is permitted by prosecutors. The law has to be clear.”
Trump is also facing a 37-count federal indictment filed by special counsel Jack Smith alleging he improperly retained and mishandled classified documents.
The former president appeared in a federal courtroom in Miami on Tuesday to plead not guilty to those charges as well.
