According to the U.S. Business Insider website on the 25th, after a long court struggle, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office obtained the tax return of former President Trump.
CNN quoted a source on Thursday as saying prosecutors got the documents hours after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s final effort to block the surrender of his tax information on Monday.
The report said that these financial documents of Trump are the core material in several investigations into whether he or the entity he controls violates state or federal laws.
The report pointed out that the Manhattan District Attorney was interested in these documents as part of the investigation into whether the Trump Group violated New York law.
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it was revealed that the Trump Group had helped pay silence fees to women who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.
While the scope of the investigation is not clear at present, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office hinted in a September court document that Trump may be investigated for suspected tax fraud.
The report said that when the case was first brought to the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers unprecedentedly claimed that the president had “absolute immunity” from any criminal investigation during his tenure.
In July, Supreme Court justices supported the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in a 7-2 ruling, but allowed Trump to continue to oppose his subpoenas on other grounds in lower courts.
A month later, a federal judge again rejected Trump’s efforts to block subpoenas, saying that the president’s behavior was “unprecedented”, “far-reaching” and “dangerous” for the rule of law.
The report said that since the Supreme Court has also cleared the way for prosecutors to get Trump’s tax bill, investigators can obtain a treasure house of potential information about the complex world of Trump’s business activities.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former private lawyer and “Personal Man”, testified to Congress in 2019 that Trump has repeatedly exaggerated or reduced the value of his financial assets for loan and tax purposes, respectively.
Cohen pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in the investigation of the United States Attorney’s Office and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller in Manhattan, after which Cohen gave testimony.
In testimony in Congress, Cohen said the U.S. Attorney’s Office was investigating “misconduct or illegal conduct” involving Trump that had not yet been disclosed at the time.
ProPublica, an American media, reported in 2019 that the Trump Group submitted different occupancy rates at Trump Tower in Manhattan to lenders and tax authorities respectively.
Earlier, Mother Jones magazine published an investigation that found that Trump may have forged a loan to avoid paying $50 million in income tax. In 2018, The New York Times reported that Trump used a series of suspicious tax rules to avoid taxes from the IRS for his $400 million estate.
In 2019, an IRS whistleblower came forward claiming that there was “inappropriate efforts” that affected the IRS’s mandatory audit of Trump’s taxes.
Late last year, the New York Times published another explosive investigation report that showed that Trump paid only $750 in income tax in 2016 and 2017.
