A grand jury has been established to determine whether the Manhattan prosecutor's file on Donald Trump and his business group can justify a trial, several US media reported on Tuesday.
It is the latest step towards Trump, 74, who left the White House in January, becoming the first former US president to face criminal charges.
Trump released a statement in response to the reports, calling the investigation “purely political” and calling it “a continuation of the largest witch hunt in American history.”
“It has never stopped…. No other president in history has had to put up with what I have had to put up with,” he wrote.
According to the Washington Post, citing sources close to the case, the jurors were recently selected and will meet three days a week for six months to review the case files.
The newspaper suggests that the move, also reported by ABC, comes because Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance may have found evidence of a crime, committed by Trump or someone close to him.
In American criminal law, important cases are often referred by the prosecution to a grand jury, made up of people from civil society, like jurors in a regular trial.. The grand jury reviews the file in secret and may also request additional documents or hear one or more witnesses.. At the end of the analysis of the case, it determines, by majority, but not necessarily unanimously, if there are grounds for the accusation, preamble to a trial.
The Trump Organization in the spotlight
Vance has been investigating since 2019 the possible accounting manipulations of the Trump Organization, the holding company of the former president of the United States that manages all his interests.
The Manhattan prosecutor is primarily seeking to determine whether the group artificially inflated the value of its assets to obtain larger loans and, at the same time, included them on its tax returns to reduce them.
If Vance could move towards an indictment, it might not be precisely against Trump himself, but could point to the organization as a legal person or collaborators of the former president of the United States in the holding company.
According to various US media, the Manhattan prosecutor's office recently focused on the financial director of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, a Trump loyalist.. Investigators believe Weisselberg knows all of the Trump family secrets and have been pressuring him for months to cooperate with their investigation.
Michael Cohen, a former Trump personal lawyer jailed for tax evasion and campaign finance violations, was one of his closest aides before turning on his former boss and deciding to cooperate with prosecutors.
In addition to Vance, fellow Democrat New York State Attorney General Letitia James is investigating Trump's business operations.
“This is purely political and an affront to the nearly 75 million voters who supported me in the presidential election and is being pushed by highly partisan Democratic prosecutors,” Trump charged in his statement.
Last week, James said his office was investigating the Trump Organization in “criminal matters” and working with Vance's team.
The Manhattan prosecutor, who is leaving office at the end of December, got eight years of Trump's tax returns in February after a years-long legal battle that reached the Supreme Court.