Hi, this is the United States of Anxiety, and I'm Kai Wright.

We launched this series way back in the summer of 2016

while trying to understand what felt like an unprecedented upheaval in American politics. That chaos is of course

the new normal now and we're thinking a lot about how to keep using this space to make

sense of it all. More to come on that front, but one thing we know we want to do is more

investigative reporting. And to that end, we've got a story we really want to share with you now.

Whatever else is true about this president,

he's certainly not afraid of a legal fight.

He brags about how often he's been sued and won.

But for all his legal battles,

the Trump family has only faced a criminal case one time, at least that we know of.

Our colleagues in the newsroom have been trying to reconstruct what happened in that probe,

and how the Trump's got out of being charged.

It's an illuminating tale as we all watch Bob Mueller's investigation of the Trump campaign

unfold.

Our story was reported in partnership with ProPublica and the New Yorker. Here's

WNYC reporters Andrea Bernstein and Ilia Merritts. In the early summer of 2008 Donald J Trump's adult children, Don Jr,

Ivanka, and Eric called a press conference for the foreign press at Trump

Tower to discuss what they saw as a hot property, the Trump Soho.

Dominic Rush was there.

He was a reporter with the Times of London then.

It was 2008, but I still quite clearly remember thinking,

...