What’s publicly known about those decisions comes largely from recent media reports. Last week’s joint story from ProPublica and The New Yorker described how Vance’s office investigated Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for allegedly making intentionally false claims to prospective investors in Trump SoHo, one of their real-estate projects in the city. Among the evidence prosecutors had against them, according to the report, was an email chain in which Donald Jr. said nobody would find out about what they’d done because nobody would see the emails.

The chain of events from there becomes thorny. First, Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s longtime legal fixer, donated $25,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign sometime in early 2012. He then met with Vance and his legal team in May 2012 to discuss the case. Three months later, Vance dropped it, and “less than six months” after that, Kasowitz donated another $50,000, the publications reported. Responding to this timeline, Vance said he returned the initial donation before meeting with Kasowitz, and said he would give back the second one. He also strongly denied that the contributions had any influence on the investigation’s outcome.

On Tuesday, Vance’s record resurfaced again after The New Yorker published a lengthy feature story on Weinstein detailing the assault and harassment allegations. (Through a representative, Weinstein told the magazine that he denied “any allegations of non-consensual sex” and that he thought any encounters were consensual.)

One of his accusers, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, told the magazine she reported Weinstein to the New York City Police Department in March 2015 shortly after he groped her. When Weinstein asked to meet her the next night, investigators with the department’s Special Victims Division asked Gutierrez to wear a wire to record their conversation, audio The New Yorker later obtained. On it, Weinstein can be heard unsuccessfully cajoling her into joining him in his hotel room; he also seems to confirm that he had previously groped her. NYPD officers took the recording and their investigation to Vance’s office, and he declined to prosecute Weinstein two weeks later.

That decision has received negative reviews from other law-enforcement officials in the city. The magazine quoted anonymous NYPD officers who expressed their frustration with it. And Slate also interviewed two former prosecutors who said the tape was likely enough to bring charges. Vance’s office, for its part, denounced Weinstein’s alleged conduct and defended its actions in the two-year-old inquiry.

“If we could have prosecuted Harvey Weinstein for the conduct that occurred in 2015, we would have,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Manhattan’s chief assistant district attorney, said in a statement. She then took the rare step of explaining why the DA declined to prosecute him at the time:

After the complaint was made in 2015, the NYPD—without our knowledge or input—arranged a controlled call and meeting between the complainant and Mr. Weinstein. The seasoned prosecutors in our Sex Crimes Unit were not afforded the opportunity before the meeting to counsel investigators on what was necessary to capture in order to prove a misdemeanor sex crime. While the recording is horrifying to listen to, what emerged from the audio was insufficient to prove a crime under New York law, which requires prosecutors to establish criminal intent. Subsequent investigative steps undertaken in order to establish intent were not successful. This, coupled with other proof issues, meant that there was no choice but to conclude the investigation without criminal charges.

It’s unusual for a prosecutor to discuss a case like this when no charges were filed, since doing so could risk tainting someone who could not defend themselves in court. Without more information, the public’s knowledge gap can be filled by suggestions of other motivations—as in Vance’s case. Soon after the Weinstein news broke, the International Business Times reported that David Boies, a high-profile Democratic litigator who once argued Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court and occasionally represents Weinstein, donated $10,000 “in the months after” Vance chose not to file charges against the Hollywood producer.