Cyrus Vance Is a Product of Dangerous One-Party Rule
12th October 2017
It’s been a bad month for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. First there were reports that he declined to indict Ivanka Trump and her brother Donald Jr. for allegedly misleading prospective real estate buyers, but not til after Vance had received a large donation from Donald Sr.’s lawyer. Then Vance turned out to have had the same damning audio recording of Harvey Weinstein admitting to groping a woman’s breasts that The New Yorker published Tuesday, yet he declined to pursue the case.
The Manhattan DA’s office has more than 800 investigators on its payroll and took in more than $12 billion from asset forfeiture since 2009. It was more than capable of doing the work that Ronan Farrow did for The New Yorker, but it didn’t.
In a normal election, this kind of two-punch October Surprise would be more enough to sink a candidate. But New York City doesn’t have normal elections. Republicans offer largely token opposition in citywide races, and most of the borough-wide races (save for Staten Island) are the same way.
While New York City allows “fusion tickets,” where a candidate runs on the line of more than one party, no third party has taken advantage of this recently to mount a credible challenge to Democratic rule.
This is the result: A district attorney faces serious questions about his ethics and his prosecutorial decisions, in a case that’s getting massive attention in the news cycle, yet he has little fear of it costing him his job at the ballot box in a few weeks.