FBI Probes Manhattan DA's Handling Of High-Profile Cases: Report

NEW YORK — Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. tried to quell concerns last year about whether political donations led his office to drop investigations of powerful figures such as Harvey Weinstein and President Donald Trump's children. But now the FBI is examining just how the DA's office handles such cases and whether some "undue influence" was involved, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.

The federal probe is focused in part on who the "major players" are in the DA's office, the paper reported, citing unnamed sources. Investigators have sought information about relationships between current and former Vance staffers and private law firms and "outside agencies," the story says.

But the DA's office is "not aware of any inquiry," spokesman Danny Frost said in a statement.

News of the investigation comes about a year after Vance, a Democrat, faced questions about his office's decisions not to bring charges against Weinstein and the Trumps around the time their lawyers made sizeable donations to his political campaign.

Vance's office declined to charge Weinstein for groping the Italian model Ambra Battliana in 2015 about four months before one of his attorneys, David Boies, made a $10,000 contribution, the International Business Times reported last October.

And Vance's office in 2012 shut down an investigation of Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump after a Trump family lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, gave $25,000 to the DA's campaign, The New Yorker, WNYC and ProPublica reported last year. Vance reportedly returned the gift before meeting with Kasowitz, but the lawyer gave even more money less than six months after the case was dropped.

The scandals spurred former Brooklyn prosecutor Marc Fliedner to run a write-in campaign against Vance last November. The DA easily won re-election anyway.

Vance sought to assauge the public concerns by asking Columbia Law School's Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity to examine his fundraising practices. When the center issued its recommendations in January, Vance said he'd keep donors identities hidden from him and would not take contributions from lawyers appearing before the DA's office.

"(P)ublic trust in prosecutors requires a leap of faith. I want to make it much easier for that faith to exist," Vance wrote in a Daily News op-ed last October.

Read the Daily News' story on the FBI probe here.

(Lead image: Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. speaks at a press conference in May 2018. Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)