President Donald Trump is being investigated by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance for alleged tax fraud — and New York-based attorney David Lurie says the president has no one but himself to blame for this information now being public knowledge.
Writing in The Daily Beast, Lurie explains how Trump “overplayed his hand” in his efforts to block Vance’s office from gaining access to his taxes.
Specifically, the president’s attorneys falsely claimed that Vance’s office was only running a narrow investigation into the president’s hush money payments to two women in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, and thus was not entitled to see his financial information.
However, Vance’s office called the president’s bluff and publicly disclosed that it was probing much more than just the president’s illegal campaign payments.
“Vance’s office stated that Trump’s claims about the supposedly limited scope of the investigation ‘is fatally undermined by undisputed information in the public record,'” Lurie writes. “In a significant footnote, the filing cited articles from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal that address some of the wide-ranging evidence of fraud by the Trump Organization that journalists have uncovered over the past several years, which have included allegedly overvaluing assets to defraud investors, bank lenders and insurers.”
While this investigation could eventually put Trump in criminal jeopardy, Lurie argues that it more immediately puts him in greater political jeopardy.
“As a result of his own lawyers’ bad strategy, Trump enters the final stretch of the campaign with the cloud of a broad criminal investigation hanging directly over his head,” he argues. “All of that would have been properly kept confidential as the grand jury continued its work if Trump’s own lawyers hadn’t opened this can of worms.”