The Mueller investigation is over, but President Donald Trump now faces a slew of other investigations by federal prosecutors in New York and Democrats in Congress that could create more deep troubles for his administration.
The biggest threat comes from federal prosecutors in New York, who have already prised a guilty plea on multiple charges from Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and who could be a dangerous witness against the president in other cases.
Investigators in the notoriously aggressive SDNY office , Southern District of New York and its sister bureau in Brooklyn, are believed to be looking at a whole manner of possible wrongdoing by Trump, his family, and his Trump Organization real estate group.
Those range from Trump’s election-eve hush payments for alleged former mistresses, financial improprieties surrounding the celebrations of his inauguration, and possibly illegal funnelling of foreign money to the Trump campaign and inauguration.
The New York state attorney general has opened inquiries into violations by the Trump family charity, real estate dealings, and taxes.
Most of those probes are taking place in secret, but the state attorney general has already sued Trump, members of his family and the Trump Foundation alleging it was used as a virtual slush fund for family needs in “a pattern of persistent illegal conduct.”
In all of those, Cohen, who has been sentenced to three years in prison, is potentially a dangerous witness as a longtime insider who has turned against his former boss.
One particularly explosive case is the SDNY probe into the payoffs Cohen illegally arranged to buy the silence of at least two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who claimed credibly to have had affairs with Trump before he ran for president.
Those were part of “catch-and-kill” arrangements with tabloid newspaper National Enquirer, which Cohen has testified had for years financial arrangements to protect Trump from any damaging personal news.