District attorney investigating Trump, company over fraud, filing suggests

NEW YORK — The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office suggested Monday it has been investigating President Donald Trump and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a significantly broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past.

The office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., made the disclosure in a new federal court filing arguing Trump’s accountants should have to comply with its subpoena seeking eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns. Trump has asked a judge to declare the subpoena invalid.

The prosecutors did not directly identify the focus of their inquiry but said that “undisputed” news reports last year about Trump’s business practices make it clear that the office had a legal basis for the subpoena.

The reports, including investigations into the president’s wealth and an article on the congressional testimony of his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, said the president may have illegally inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to lenders and insurers. Lawyers for Trump have said he did nothing wrong.

The clash over the subpoena comes less than a month after the Supreme Court, in a major ruling on the limits of presidential power, cleared the way for Vance’s prosecutors to seek Trump’s financial records.

The filing from prosecutors came in response to an argument Trump made last week, calling the subpoena from Vance, a Democrat, “wildly overbroad” and issued in bad faith.

Vance’s office subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August 2019 for the tax returns as part of its investigation, which until now was believed to be focused on hush-money payments made to two women who said they had affairs with Trump, including adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Vance’s office has been looking into whether any New York state laws were broken when those payments were made.

If Vance succeeds in eventually obtaining Trump’s records, they are unlikely to become public anytime soon because they will be shielded by grand jury secrecy rules. The records might only emerge later if criminal charges are brought and the records are introduced in a trial.