Eric Trump Whines About Avalanche Of Trump Subpoenas, Confirming Multiple Investigations Pending
That boy ain't too bright.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“Get yourself booked on Hannity so you can tell the world that your family is drowning in subpoenas, it’ll make you look totally innocent.”
SAID NO LAWYER EVER.
And yet, the former president’s numpty son Eric did just that last night, whining to the sympathetic Fox host about the eleventy-seven pending investigations of his family.
“Listen, I’m on the receiving end of it every single day,” he said, almost tearing up in righteous indignation. “My father gets subpoena after subpoena. We do as a family.”
Well, that’s one way to confirm that the investigations by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James are ratcheting up. As if the news that Vance has empaneled a grand jury and is calling witnesses in an attempt to flip longtime Trump Organization CEO Allen Weisselberg aren’t sufficient evidence that Trump’s legal problems aren’t going away.
This isn’t even the first time that Loose Lips Eric has forced pending, secret investigations into the public eye. Thanks to his fruitless effort to avoid being deposed by AG James last summer — and his threat to plead the Fifth if forced to testify — the public got this 68-page memorandum of law explaining exactly why her office was so hot to get him under oath. And it wasn’t, as the Boy Wonder complained to Hannity last night, because “they look for any single comma that’s out of place.”
As the memorandum lays out, the investigation centers (or did at the time) on possible fraudulent asset valuation, particularly as relates to Trump’s Seven Springs property in Westchester County, New York, which he valued somewhere between $20 million and $291 million, depending on whether he was negotiating with the tax collector or claiming to be wealthy enough to buy the Buffalo Bills. In 2015, the family claimed a $21.5 million conservation easement after donating a parcel of the property that they’d tried and failed to develop, retaining the valuable bit with the giant mansion on it for themselves.
There’s also the minor matter of whether the Trump Organization appropriately picked up $102 million of imputed income after Fortress Credit Corporation accepted $48 million in satisfaction of a $150 million note on the Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago. Which is quite a few commas.
And while reporters had been hot on the trail of those stories for years, they were still delighted to get a peek at the NYAG’s investigation thanks to Eric Trump’s failed gambit to avoid going under oath.
“They attack us, they go after us for for doing absolutely nothing wrong,” he wailed, before decrying the unfairness of his father being forced leave money on the table as president. “We gave up business when my father went to the White House. They did the exact opposite. When Joe Biden became Vice President, Hunter Biden got into business. And yet, every single day my family is attacked.”
Which is not a defense of his family’s accounting practices. And in fact Hunter Biden is under federal investigation thanks to Bill Barr and the vast Justice Department resources he devoted to processing literal Russian propaganda laundered by the former president’s private lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
But you know who doesn’t go on television and whine that “prosecutorial conduct in this country is out of control” while revealing details of sealed investigations?
That would be Hunter Biden. But keep talking, Eric, we’re all ears.
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
