NEW YORK – Bye, Cy!
Knee deep in millions of pages of ex-president Donald Trump’s tax returns, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. said Friday he would not run for a fourth term.
“Representing the People of New York during this pivotal era for our city and our justice system has been the privilege of a lifetime,” said Vance in a statement.
“When I ran for this job in 2009, I said that a District Attorney’s responsibilities should extend beyond obtaining convictions in court, and that a 21st century prosecutor’s mandate is to move our justice system and our community forward.”
The announcement comes just weeks after Vance claimed victory in a bitter court fight over access to Trump’s taxes that made it to the Supreme Court.
In a unanimous Feb. 25 ruling, the nation’s top court rejected the ex-president’s bid to quash a subpoena on eight years of his personal and corporate financial records. The ruling authorized Vance to immediately retrieve the tax documents and show them to a Manhattan grand jury as part of his ongoing criminal probe into Trump’s finances.
I discovered recently that hearing aids could be purchased online. I decided to take the plunge with a hearing aid company and test the idea of hearing aids online for myself.
The investigation into Trump and his namesake business over tax, bank, and insurance fraud centers on allegations that he knowingly inflated and deflated the value of his assets and properties over many years, in part to avoid paying taxes.
Portions of the documents exposed by the New York Times in 2020 showed Trump paid just $1,500 in federal income tax over 11 years, between 2006 and 2017.
Vance, in early February, hired Mark Pomerantz to assist in the investigation, a veteran white-collar prosecutor who took down former Gambino crime family boss John “Junior” Gotti.
It’s not clear, however, that Vance’s successor will continue to pursue the case against Trump, a Republican who became a one-term president after losing the November 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.
The progressive candidates vying for the Manhattan District Attorney spot have been critical of Vance’s policies on the campaign trail, and most have made re-hauling his scandal-plagued sex crimes unit a top priority.
The seven contenders are former chief deputy state attorney general Alvin Bragg, former Brooklyn prosecutor Tali Farhadian Weinstein, former Manhattan prosecutors Lucy Lang, Diana Florence, and Liz Crotty, former Legal Aid lawyer Eliza Orlins, and state Assemblyman Dan Quart.
Vance was elected Manhattan DA 12 years ago, after running on a campaign promise to ensure “safety in the streets and fairness in the courtrooms.”
His critics say that Vance mostly reserved his gung-ho approach to pursuing criminal cases against Black and Hispanic New Yorkers while taking a more lenient approach for the city’s elite, including his decision not to pursue one of the earliest groping accusations against then powerful movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Vance’s office did secure the first criminal conviction against Weinstein in March 2020, landing the disgraced film producer behind bars for 23 years for a string of sex assaults.
But that victory was partially sullied by the fact that Vance declined to bring charges against Weinstein in 2015 — pre-#MeToo movement — for allegedly groping Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez.
Vance was also harshly criticized for his handling of the 2016 case of Columbia University gynecologist Robert Hadden.
Facing dozens of accusations he fondled and performed unwanted oral sex on his patients, the Ivy League doctor pleaded guilty to two counts covering just two victims in a widely-criticized sweetheart deal with Manhattan prosecutors.
Hadden served no jail time as a part of that agreement, but he is now being tried in federal court and faces significant prison time if convicted.
Vance has defended his decisions on Weinstein and Hadden, claiming prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to pursue heftier cases.
Amid the criticism, Vance’s office has secured several high-profile wins.
In February 2017, the Manhattan DA convicted cold case murderer Pedro Hernandez for the notorious killing of 6-year-old SoHo schoolboy Etan Patz in 1979.
The Manhattan DA in September 2018 vacated the warrants of more than 3,000 New Yorkers with open marijuana cases — some dating back as far as the 1970s — in a move aimed at addressing one of the most glaring racial disparities in the criminal legal system.
The office has slashed its prosecutions by more than half in his tenure, but Vance has prosecuted close to 1 million people since taking office, data on the Manhattan DA’s website shows.
Vance, whose predecessor Robert Morgenthau spent 34 years as Manhattan DA, said he never envisioned he’d stay in office that long.
“I never imagined myself as District Attorney for decades like my predecessors,” he said. “I never thought of this as my last job, even though it’s the best job and biggest honor I’ll ever have. I said twelve years ago that change is fundamentally good and necessary for any institution.”
