This summer, the federal prosecutors at the SDNY announced that they wouldn’t be bringing any further criminal indictments – for the time being at least – in Donald Trump’s hush money scandal. This was odd to say the least, as only Michael Cohen had been indicted in what was a fairly large criminal conspiracy.

At the time, Palmer Report wrote that there were only two possibilities. One was that Donald Trump’s corrupt Attorney General Bill Barr had found a way to force the SDNY to shut the whole thing down before the indictments could reach anyone Trump cared about. The other possibility was that the SDNY made this announcement of its own accord, as a way of signaling to the State of New York that it could go ahead and proceed with its own indictments.

Yesterday NBC News reported that a New York grand jury has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s tax returns. The real story here is that this means the grand jury is targeting Trump for criminal indictment. Sure enough, it looks like the Feds at the SDNY were indeed signaling to New York state prosecutors that they could safely proceed on state level charges. CNN Legal Analyst Jennifer Rodgers tweeted this analysis: “It’s looking more and more like SDNY was deferring to state prosecutors in ending federal hush money-related investigations. This is smart. The local prosecutors have a lot of laws to choose from and DOJ/Bill Barr can’t shut down their case.”

In general, state prosecutors don’t issue indictments in a given case, until federal prosecutors are done with their own proceedings. For instance, a few minutes after Paul Manafort was sentenced at the end of his federal trial, New York unsealed an indictment against Manafort on state charges. With the Feds having punted on the hush money case, New York is free to issue indictments at any time.

The question now is whether New York will indict Donald Trump and his family members now, or immediately after the election. It’s worth noting that if Donald Trump loses the 2020 election, the SDNY will then be free to immediately indict him on federal charges. New York State knows this. If New York State were planning to wait and indict Trump immediately after the election, it wouldn’t make sense for New York to proceed at all, as by that time the SDNY would also be back in the game. We think this means New York is planning to indict Trump and/or his family before the 2020 election. Stay tuned.



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