Ever since the submission of the Mueller Report to Attorney General William Barr, speculation as to why there were no indictments filed against any members of the Trump family has been rampant. We know that Mueller didn’t intend to file any indictments against the President himself, per the DOJ policy of not doing so while a President is still in office, but seeing Don Jr., Ivanka, and Jared Kushner escape charges (for now) was tough to watch.
But some analysis points at Mueller having handed off his investigative work and relevant materials to US Attorneys in individual state courts, such as the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. That stands to reason, since (a) some of the charges that each of them might face are more pertinent to the jurisdiction in which the crimes involved were committed, and (b) unless Mueller had concrete proof of the things he suspected each of them of being involved in, indicting them in federal court could have made a path for either an easy acquittal or an eventual pardon by Trump himself.
Nobody wants to see that.
But the fact remains that much of the criminal evidence that has become public over the last two years has involved Trump’s children and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, from Don Jr.’s involvement in the Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin lawyer to Ivanka’s tour of Moscow with Russian mafia-connected Felix Sater to Jared’s ongoing saga of his unwarranted security clearance.
Now it looks like the Southern District has made a move specifically to address this exact issue.
The newest hire in the Manhattan-based Attorney’s Office should be familiar to the patriarch of the Trump clan: Audrey Strauss was only a rookie prosecutor when she defeated Trump’s legendary mentor Roy Cohn in court as he attempted to have the convictions of his mafia clients Joseph Gambino and Carlo Conti overturned. Cohn was fresh off defending Trump and his father against charges of housing discrimination when he took on the mobsters’ case, and Strauss handed him his ass.
Now she’s the second in command at SDNY.
With her specialty in mafia and securities cases and her extensive prosecutorial career, there’s absolutely no reason that Don Jr., Ivanka, and Jared should not be wetting their thousand-dollar pants right now.
Featured image via screen capture
