Most of the investigations focus on President Donald Trump or his family business or a cadre of his advisers and associates, according to court records and interviews with people briefed on the investigations. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, with about half of them being run by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Unlike Mueller, whose mandate was largely focused on any links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan take an expansive view of their jurisdiction. That authority has enabled them, along with FBI agents, to scrutinize a broader orbit around the president, including his family business.
Trump told The New York Times in 2017 that any examination of his family’s finances, beyond any relationship to Russia, would cross a red line, and last year he privately asked former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker if someone he viewed as loyal could be put in charge of the investigations at the Manhattan office, The Times reported last month.
Some of those federal investigations in the Manhattan office, known as the Southern District of New York, grew out of its case against Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer.
Since Cohen pleaded guilty in August to helping arrange hush money payments to women who said they had affairs with Trump, the prosecutors have focused on what role the Trump Organization and its executives may have played in the scheme, according to people briefed on the matter.
Taken together, the investigations show that the prosecutorial center of gravity has shifted from Mueller’s office in Washington to New York.
“The important thing to remember is that almost everything Donald Trump did was in the Southern District of New York,” said John S. Martin Jr., a retired federal judge who was U.S. attorney in the Southern District during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
James M. Margolin, a spokesman for the Southern District, declined to comment, as did the Trump Organization.