(PresidentialWire.com)- A reporter recently predicted that former President Donald Trump and three of his children would face criminal charges of racketeering.
David Clay Johnston told CNN recently that he believed the former presidents, his three eldest children — Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. — along with Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, would face the racketeering charges in the future.
Johnston is the reporter who in 2017 obtained and then reported on Trump’s tax return from 2005. He also said that the Mazars USA, which was the accounting firm that served Trump for a long time, was working with prosecutors in Manhattan to compile “a New York State racketeering case against Trump, the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg and probably Donald’s three oldest children.”
Just last week, Mazars USA cut all ties with the former president and the Trump Organization. In a letter they sent out on February 9, the accounting firm said it couldn’t stand behind more than 10 years of financial statements they prepared for Trump’s company.
Mazars wrote in the letter that the Trump Organization should retract the statements of financial condition the firm prepared between 2011 and 2020. They noted the firm hadn’t “as a whole” found any material discrepancy between the information the Trump Organization provided to them and the actual value of Trump’s assets.
The letter also said the Trump Organization should tell anyone who received these statements that they shouldn’t be relied upon any longer, due to what they labeled “the totality of circumstances.”
The Trump Organization responded to the Mazars’ letter becoming public by releasing a statement that said:
“Mazars’ work was performed in accordance with all applicable accounting standards and principles and that such statements of financial condition do not contain any material discrepancies. This confirmation effectively renders the investigations by the DA and the AG moot.”
These statements are what Trump used to secure various loans — and they are the center of two separate investigations by the Manhattan DA’s office and the New York State attorney general’s office.
This admission by the Trump Organization’s former accounting firm that the documents are “fundamentally flawed,” as The New York Times wrote, is one of the reasons why Johnston made his prediction. He didn’t say whether he believed the group of people who are the target of these investigations would be found guilty, but he does believe they will eventually be charged with crimes.
The Manhattan DA’s investigation would be the one that would bring criminal charges against any of the subjects of the investigation. The New York AG office’s investigation is a civil problem into the business dealings of the Trump Organization.
That being said, the state attorney general has been assisting the Manhattan DA’s office with its probe from the very beginning.
So, while the two investigations are definitely separate from each other — and would have different potential consequences — they are, in fact, intertwined.
