New York Manafort Investigations Have an Advantage: No Federal Meddling
- Manafort’s real estate deals said to be under state scrutiny
- Trump called Schneiderman a ‘lightweight’ and ‘total failure’
Paul Manafort.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
New York authorities have jumped into the fray investigating the activities of Paul Manafort, a onetime campaign manager for President Donald Trump. To some it may seem like piling on, but the state’s efforts bear an important distinction from any parallel federal probes: Neither Trump nor the Justice Department nor the FBI has any control over them.
As Wall Street learned when then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer took it on more than a decade ago, a state prosecutor can rattle an entire industry even without federal cooperation.