Once the district attorney’s office responds, the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, will decide whether to dismiss some of the charges. Such motions are standard, and judges rarely toss out criminal cases altogether.
If Justice Merchan declines to dismiss the case, it is likely to continue to trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. He has tentatively set a late summer trial date.
The filings on Tuesday followed a brutal stretch for the Trump Organization, which is also contending with Ms. James’s civil investigation. In a court filing last week, the state attorney general revealed that Mr. Trump’s longtime accounting firm had cut ties with him and essentially retracted a decade of his financial statements.
Both her civil inquiry and Mr. Bragg’s criminal investigation are centered on whether Mr. Trump used those statements to improperly inflate the value of his assets.
Ms. James had sought to question Mr. Trump under oath, which he has resisted, and last week, a judge sided with her. The judge ordered Mr. Trump and two of his adult children to face questioning from Ms. James’s office in the coming weeks, a major blow to the Trumps, who say they intend to appeal the ruling. (If they are interviewed, they are likely to decline to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.)
Lawyers for Mr. Trump also argued in that hearing that Ms. James’s investigation was politically motivated. But the judge dismissed that argument, saying that the attorney general had a sufficient basis for continuing her investigation.
Although Ms. James does not have the ability to charge Mr. Trump criminally, she can sue him, and in a court filing last month, she suggested that she had already amassed significant evidence against Mr. Trump’s family business, accusing it of engaging in “fraudulent or misleading” practices.
One piece of evidence she cited was Mr. Weisselberg’s admission that the company had overstated the value of Mr. Trump’s penthouse in Trump Tower. In testimony with the attorney general’s office, Mr. Weisselberg acknowledged that the company had overvalued the apartment by “give or take” $200 million.

Source: New York Times

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