For starters, they have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that executive privilege doesn’t cover.

Even as speculation mounts that special counsel Robert Mueller might be winding down his investigation, a parallel threat to President Donald Trump only seems to be growing within his own Justice Department: the Southern District of New York.

Manhattan-based federal prosecutors can challenge Trump in ways Mueller can’t. They have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that aren’t protected by executive privilege, a tool Trump is considering invoking to block portions of Mueller’s report. From a PR perspective, Trump has been unable to run the same playbook on SDNY that he’s used to erode conservatives’ faith in Mueller, the former George W. Bush-appointed FBI director. Legal circles are also buzzing over whether SDNY might buck DOJ guidance and seek to indict a sitting president.

The threat was highlighted when SDNY prosecutors ordered officials from Trump’s inaugural committee to hand over donor and financial records. It was the latest aggressive move from an office that has launched investigations into the president’s company, former lawyer and campaign finance practices. New York prosecutors have even implicated Trump in a crime.

Add it all up and the result is a spate of hard-to-stymie, legally perilous probes that appears on track to drag on well into Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. SDNY stands poised to carry on Mueller’s efforts whenever the special counsel’s office closes shop, and it’s likely to draw even more attention if freshly confirmed Attorney General William Barr — who now oversees the Russia probe as DOJ head — clamps down on the public release of Mueller’s findings.

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Mueller can take credit for spawning significant parts of SDNY’s work. The two DOJ units have shared staff, witnesses and leads, and SDNY has been well-positioned to pick up anything that is outside Mueller’s primary lane of investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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The New York federal prosecutors are far from finished. They’re still seeking interviews with Trump Organization executives, according to a source with knowledge of the probe. And Trump’s inaugural committee confirmed earlier this month that it had received a wide-ranging subpoena from SDNY for documents as part of a probe into how the group raised and doled out a record $107 million. Investigators are looking at everything from potential mail and wire fraud to illegal foreign contributions and money laundering.

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SDNY poses an potent threat because the office has accumulated a perfect storm of witnesses who have guided Trump throughout his career, from his businesses to his meteoric rise in presidential politics up through his inauguration to the White House.

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Trump’s attack-Mueller playbook can’t be replicated in New York. For starters, the bounds of what SDNY is looking at don’t deal with Trump’s tenure in the White House, meaning any push back on executive privilege grounds won’t fly. Trump’s lawyers have said they’ve resisted Mueller’s attempts to get the president to answer questions about potential obstruction of justice matters dealing with his time in the Oval Office. And they continue to signal the president’s team should be allowed to review the special counsel’s finished report to ensure it doesn’t violate the president’s rights.

Trump is limited in his abilities to use his bully pulpit against SDNY — which has nowhere near the name recognition of the special counsel — in the way he has used Twitter, rallies and even the State of the Union to lambaste Mueller.

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Trump’s complaints about the Mueller probe — railing against his team of “angry Democrats” and even going after the special counsel himself in more than 70 mentions on Twitter since last March — have helped the president turn his political base against the Russia investigation. A voters, a record low 13 percent of registered Republican voters reported having a favorable view of Mueller in a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. While that can help the president maintain GOP support in an impeachment battle, legal experts and Trump’s allies have said similar attacks on SDNY won’t matter much should the battleground become a court of law and not the halls of Congress.

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