One issue that is being discussed openly among lawyers is whether Vance will act quickly and decide to charge a crime or close the investigation before leaving office – or whether he will leave those decisions to his successor.
“It is likely that the case, if charged, will be tried before Vance leaves office,” said Anne Milgram, a former New Jersey attorney general and a former federal attorney. “This is because there are 10 months to go – which is a long time in a criminal investigation – and because the prosecutor’s office had already noticed that there were issues of prescription time,” she said.
Vance’s team of prosecutors has been investigating the Trump Organization for more than two years and on Monday received a significant boost to the investigation after the Supreme Court cleared the way for investigators to receive tax returns, financial statements and other records from the accountant Trump’s long standing, Mazars.
The prosecutor received the records on Monday, the office confirmed, and sources say there are millions of pages of documents to review.
“I think Cy is a serious person who cares about getting it right – this is going to be an important part of his legacy at the office,” said Eric Soufer, a former senior attorney in the New York attorney general’s office who is now at Tusk Strategies.
There are eight Democratic candidates competing in the June primaries to succeed Vance – and the winner in Manhattan, where Democrats, would likely win the race in the November general election.
The field of candidates is diverse and includes former prosecutors, a public defender who competed on the reality show Survivor, a civil rights attorney and a New York state deputy.
They have been openly talking about criminal justice reform, reviewing the sexual crimes unit and holding powerful people accountable, but Trump’s investigation could hijack the race in a city that is decidedly against him.
“A race that can – on the one hand can be very justly focused on criminal justice reform – is suddenly starting to become a bit more of a referendum on how qualified you are to prosecute Donald Trump,” said Soufer.
Who could take over the investigation?
If the decision to prosecute the case falls to his successor, it will be a potentially thorny issue that he or she will have to resolve from the start.
Alvin Bragg, a former federal prosecutor at the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan’s public corruption unit and assistant attorney general at the New York Attorney General’s Office, has argued with Trump before.
At the AG office, he oversaw more than 100 lawsuits against the policies of the Trump administration, from the travel ban to the DACA, as well as the office lawsuit against the Trump Foundation, which claimed that Trump, his sons Eric, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, violated the state’s charitable and campaign finance rules and “was little more than a checkbook to serve Trump’s business and political interests,” according to the lawsuit.
On the Manhattan prosecutor’s criminal investigation, Bragg said he could not comment specifically on what he would do with the investigation, but said “it was where the facts took me for more than 20 years”.
“We know what has been reported,” he said. “But we don’t know the steps the office has taken to any full extent, so I wouldn’t like to make any assumptions.”
Others were more vocal. Lucy Lang, who was a prosecutor in Manhattan for 12 years and left in 2018, asked Vance’s investigation of Trump to continue in December, saying “immunity is not a consolation prize for losing an election”.
“There have been a number of high-profile cases that give the impression that there has been some kind of special access. The next prosecutor must ensure that New Yorkers know that the powerful and well-connected are considered to be the same standards of justice,” Lang told CNN.
One of Lang’s advisers is Peirce Moser, a former prosecutor who led the office’s investigation of Trump Soho before it was abandoned. Lang, who was not involved in the Trump SoHo investigation, declined to comment on whether she would reopen it if she won.
Regarding the criticisms, Vance said: “Ultimately, we operate in the court of law, not in the court of public opinion.”
Following the evidence
One thing that several candidates can agree on is that whoever replaces Vance must have a strong knowledge of complex investigations.
Diana Florence, who has worked in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for 25 years, says she wants to prioritize the persecution of “crimes of power, not crimes of poverty”, but declined to elaborate on the Trump investigation.
“These cases never start the way they do, you always have to follow the evidence,” Florence told CNN.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor and, most recently, general counsel for the Brooklyn Public Prosecutor’s Office, says he will pledge to hold anyone accountable for violating the laws, even Trump, but would approach these investigations with “an open mind”.
“Just to be absolutely clear, suing Trump at the DA’s Manhattan office is not about politics. It’s not about holding him accountable for what kind of president he was. Or what kind of politics he tried to put in the world,” said Weinstein CNN . “The question is, did he violate the laws or his associates … did they violate the laws of the state of New York and hurt the New Yorkers?”
“There is nothing that I will not examine, because I think that holding people who are rich and powerful and just thinking that they can exercise that power and wealth, not being held accountable, you know, is simply unacceptable,” Orlins told CNN.
Civil rights lawyer Tahani Aboushi rushed to JFK airport after Trump’s travel ban, where she spent days helping travelers, many of them detainees, who were unaware of the new policy. “It was chaos,” Aboushi told CNN. “People were petrified.”
However, Aboushi says he wants to remain neutral when it comes to discussing the ongoing Trump investigation, emphasizing that it would address the investigations that went through the office.
“I think what people are waiting for in response to Trump is: are the powerful and privileged going to be subject to the same system by which the rest of us are prosecuted?” Aboushi said. “And that’s what I commit to not putting any badges or bank accounts above the law.”
Another candidate is Dan Quart, a tenant rights lawyer and New York state deputy. Before announcing he was running for district attorney, he voted in favor of two bills in the state legislature that aimed to limit Trump’s authority as president: one intended to weaken a president’s pardoning power by closing a double risk gap in the state , and the other would allow the state to deliver the Trump Congressional tax returns.
Now, as a candidate in the race, Quart is more reserved about how he feels about the investigation.
“If there is evidence that a serious crime has been committed, I will prosecute, and this is true for the former president as much as it is true for anyone, for anyone else,” Quart told CNN.
For Liz Crotty, who spent six years in the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, including under Vance, remaining silent in the investigation of the Trump Organization’s trade negotiations is what any candidate who is serious about taking office should do.
“I will just follow the party line (which) is that until I know the facts, I cannot commit to anything,” Crotty told CNN. “It is the only responsible answer.”