Hollywood’s king caught on tape. The president’s children caught in emails. Manhattan’s district attorney has no good excuse for letting them all walk.
Harvey Weinstein, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. have one thing in common: They were all spared by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance.
In each of their cases, Vance declined to prosecute. In the case of the Trumps, Vance claims he “made the right call.” In the case of Weinstein, he claims there was insufficient evidence. He is wrong in both cases.
This week he claimed he couldn’t prosecute Weinstein because he lacked sufficient proof of Weinstein’s criminal intent when he allegedly groped Ambra Battilana in New York in March 2015. In fact, the evidence against Weinstein for sexual abuse is overwhelming.
The charge here, a misdemeanor, simply requires proof of sexual contact without consent. (There is also the likely charge of harassment.) The NYPD with Battilana’s consent secretly taped Weinstein aggressively entreating her—despite her pleas to stop—to come into his room, watch him shower, and submit to his sexual advances. Weinstein admits his conduct, wants to do it again, and tries to exploit his powerful position to force the young woman to succumb. When she tells him he engaged in sexual contact with her the day before, and it made her so uncomfortable, Weinstein agrees, and says he won’t do it again. His intent is unmistakable.
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As with the Weinstein case, Vance has given a number of explanations for dropping the Trump case. He claimed there was insufficient evidence that the Trumps had broken the law, but also that the victims were really not victims and in any event they were unwilling to cooperate with his office.
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Last week, as reported in an exhaustive report by The New Yorker, ProPublica, and WNYC, Vance overruled prosecutors in his office who were making a clearly prosecutable case against Ivanka and Donald Jr. for luring prospective buyers of a Trump luxury development in SoHo by making false and deceptive promotions. The Trumps, as the prosecution’s evidence shows convincingly, used Enron-like come-ons to intentionally inflate the value of the development to induce investors to buy units.
The prosecutors discovered numerous emails by the Trumps which showed how they repeatedly lied to buyers. The emails, according to persons who viewed them, had the Trumps discuss how to coordinate the false information they had given to prospective buyers; Donald Jr. tell a broker that nobody would ever find out because people on the email chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception; and that the Trumps approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales. In other words, the emails proved the Trumps knew what they were doing was wrong.
Based on these emails, documentary evidence, and interviews with buyers, the prosecutors had assembled sufficient evidence of the Trumps’ criminal conduct to impanel a grand jury. But that was before Vance met with the Trumps’ lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. Before and after Vance overruled his prosecutors, Kasowitz made large donations to his re-eletion campaign.
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Prosecutor Threw Away Slam-Dunk Cases Against Weinstein and Trump Kids – not to mention DSK … https://t.co/7ggRBiK9R0 via @thedailybeast
— csdickey (@csdickey) October 11, 2017
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