Cyrus Vance Jr.
By
Embattled Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. may be running
for reelection unopposed, but that doesn’t mean he’s off the hook for
declining to prosecute cases against Harvey Weinstein and President
Donald Trump’s eldest children and accepting campaign cash from lawyers
linked to those would-be defendants in the process. Under New York law,
Vance could be immediately removed from office by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a
fellow Democrat.
The major obstacle to such a move, however, might
not be a shared party, but shared donors: Cuomo himself has received
$127,000 from some of the same Vance contributors at the heart of the
recent controversies — and he has also received more than $72,000
directly from Weinstein himself.
The New York Constitution
gives the governor power to remove a district attorney at any time, so
long as the governor gives the DA a “copy of the charges against him or
her” and “an opportunity of being heard in his or her defense.” It also
explicitly declares that “any district attorney who shall fail
faithfully to prosecute a person charged with the violation in his or
her county of any provision of this article which may come to his or her
knowledge, shall be removed from office by the governor.”
Cuomo
is a potential 2020 presidential candidate who has cast himself as a
bold opponent of Trump and defender of women’s rights.
His office
did not respond to repeated International Business Times requests for
comment about Vance’s decisions not to persue indictments of the Trumps
or Weinstein.
Click here for the full article.
Source: International Business Times (via The Empire Report)
No comments:
Post a Comment