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Manhattan DA reportedly looking into Donald Trump Jr. as part of investigation into his dad's business dealings

Ashley Collman
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Donald Trump Jr
Donald Trump Jr. John Bazemore/AP Photos

Donald Trump Jr. has reportedly become a new focus of the Manhattan District Attorney Office investigation into the Trump Organization.

The Daily Beast reported that the probe into the Trump enterprise has been expanded, and that investigators have become interested in the activities of Trump Jr. and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer.

The Daily Beast didn't specify what the district attorney was interested in regarding Trump Jr. and Weisselberg, but District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. has been opaque about the investigation from the get-go.

Court filings indicate that his office is looking into "extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization," according to the Associated Press.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office declined to confirm The Daily Beast's reporting on Trump Jr. and Weisselberg. The Trump Organization has not responded to Insider's request for comment.

cy vance
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance at a press conference on February 24, 2020. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty

Vance won a major court battle earlier this week when the US Supreme Court rejected Trump's attempts to shield his tax returns from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, which has been seeking them for years.

And in another hint that the investigation is heating up, Vance's team recently brought on a top prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, whose speciality is white-collar and organized crime.

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, it was announced that his two eldest sons, Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, would continue to lead the family business in his absence, rebuffing calls to completely divest from the business or put his assets in a blind trust.

To avoid conflicts of interest, the company promised not to enter any new overseas deals and would only undertake new domestic projects with the approval of a company ethics advisor, Reuters reported at the time.

But ethics experts told Reuters at the time that the arrangement did not go far enough to separate the president from his business, due to his sons still being involved.

While the Trump Organization didn't enter into any new foreign business deals during Trump's four years in office, it still continued previously hatched overseas projects.

Illustrating the kind of problems this presented was a 2018 trip Trump Jr. took to India to tour Trump-branded properties. Trump Jr. had planned to give a foreign-policy speech during the trip, but it was abruptly canceled after ethics watchdogs and Democratic lawmakers questioned why the president's son would be discussing US foreign policy during a business trip as a private citizen, according to The Guardian.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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