Eric Trump shits the bed in New York State investigation into Donald Trump

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Last month New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that she’s been leading an investigation into the financial dealings of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, and that she would seek to force Eric Trump to testify. At the time, Palmer Report explained that these kinds of multi-tier investigations generally start with the bottom rung like Eric, and then move up to someone like Don Junior, and then to Donald Trump himself.

The point of interrogating Eric Trump is to get him to either slip up and tell the ugly truth about something that can be used against his family business, or to goad him into telling a provable lie so that the threat of perjury charges can be used to force him to come clean. The stakes are high because even though New York State’s investigation is a civil suit, it dovetails with the criminal indictment that the Manhattan District Attorney and a well-documented grand jury are in the process of bringing against Donald Trump.

The question has been whether Eric Trump would show up and testify in the hope that he could outsmart the interrogators, or if he would just refuse to show up in the hope that the courts won’t order him to. Instead, Eric has decided to take a third path, and it sure feels like a dumb one. He’s announced that he’s willing to testify and provide the subpoenaed documents, but only if the New York Attorney General agrees not to share them with any other investigators or prosecutors.

In other words, Eric Trump just tipped off that his testimony and documents are incriminating, and that he’s afraid the Manhattan DA will get ahold of them if he gives them to the New York Attorney General. Now the DA is certainly going to seek to compel Eric to provide testimony and evidence to the grand jury against his father. This is like the police showing up at your front door, and you telling them they’re free to look anywhere except under the living room rug. Eric just helped give away the game.

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