Did Donald Trump, fresh from getting the DOJ off New York Mayor Eric Adams’s case, just give a get-out-of-jail-free card to long-time friend Vince McMahon?
What we know for sure is that the Justice Department has dropped its criminal probe of McMahon involving the former WWE CEO’s efforts to cover up multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, per reporting from the Trump-friendly New York Post on Wednesday.
McMahon, 78, who has ties to AFP’s base of operations in Waynesboro – he is a 1964 alum of Fishburne Military School – had been “the subject of an ongoing grand jury investigation concerning whether, as CEO, he engaged in a criminal scheme to circumvent the company’s internal accounting controls and mislead company auditors in order to conceal multiple allegations of sexual misconduct raised against him by two former company employees,” according to court documents.
The allegations had to do with allegations of sexual misconduct from two former WWE employees who McMahon paid $10.5 million for their silence.
The activity with the grand jury investigation came to light last week with a ruling handed down by an appeals court panel in the case.
The appeals court was considering a filing from McMahon’s lawyers challenging a lower-court ruling from last summer that had found “probable cause to believe” that McMahon and one of his former lawyers had broken the law with the payments.
Consider the source here – as I mentioned above, the New York Post is Trump-friendly; it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News CEO – but the Post is claiming that the case was dropped sometime before Jan. 10, which would come before Trump began his second term in the White House.
Fair question – why, then, would there have been a need for the appeals court to weigh in last week on the summertime ruling about probable cause?
Could it have to do with the scheduled beginning of the confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate on Thursday for McMahon’s estranged wife, Linda, to be the head of the Education Department?
Nah, total coincidence.