Prosecutors in New York State are preparing to launch their own investigations into various people surrounding President Donald Trump now the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report is completed.
From The New York Times:
Most of the investigations focus on President Trump or his family business or a cadre of his advisers and associates, according to court records and interviews with people briefed on the investigations. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, with about half of them being run by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Unlike Mr. Mueller, whose mandate was largely focused on any links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan take an expansive view of their jurisdiction. That authority has enabled them, along with F.B.I. agents, to scrutinize a broader orbit around the president, including his family business.
Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York are the ones investigating. Specifically, they're focused on the Trump Organization and its executives. Prosecutors want to know what role those people played, if any, in arranging payments to two women during the 2016 campaign to keep them from speaking publicly about affairs they claimed they had with Trump.
Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to helping arrange the payments made to the president's alleged mistresses. He has worked with prosecutors to provide them with information in a separate investigation into Trump's inaugural committee, something he hopes will reduce his three-year prison sentence.
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“The important thing to remember is that almost everything Donald Trump did was in the Southern District of New York,” John S. Martin Jr., a retired federal judge who was the United States attorney in the Southern District during the Carter and Reagan administrations, told The Times. “He ran his business in the Southern District. He ran his campaign from the Southern District. He came home to New York every night.”
Right now, we don't know how many additional investigations are taking place because they're done behind closed doors and in secret. We do, however, know that United States attorneys’ offices in Brooklyn, the District of Columbia and the Eastern District of Virginia have inquired about the Mueller report.
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