Trump Organization CFO , Surrenders to Manhatten DA
Photo by thenails, CC BY 2.0
The long-awaited results of a Manhattan grand jury have come for the Trump Organization, with long-time CFO Allen Weisselberg indicted and surrendering to authorities prior to the release of charges.
Former President Donald Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has surrendered to authorities in New York to face criminal charges, court officials told ABC News Thursday morning.
Weisselberg arrived at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with his lawyer hours after a grand jury indicted him and the Trump Organization on charges that are expected to be unsealed this afternoon.
A special grand jury in Manhattan voted Wednesday to indict Trump’s firm and its chief financial officer.
The charges are believed to involve fringe benefits given to employees, including Weisselberg, sources said. Investigators have been examining whether the company and Weisselberg properly accounted for those forms of compensation.
“Allen Weisselberg is a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather who has worked at the Trump Organization for 48 years,” a spokesperson for the Trump Organization said in a statement Thursday after Weisselberg surrendered to authorities. “He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President. The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics.”
Attorneys for the former president’s company were told to expect charges last week by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s staff, sources said.
The charges are expected to be released later this afternoon. With Allen Weisselberg indicted, he joins a list of eight Trump associates that have wound up arrested or in jail. Unlike some of those associates though, Trump is not longer president so there will be no pardoning or commuting of sentence if convicted. But that is a long ways away yet, and Weisselberg will have many days in court and his own defense, and is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Once again, though, and underling goes to court when many folks where hoping for the boss. That has again not happened. There will be much talk about “it’s a step closer to Trump in handcuffs!” from the former president’s many detractors, but we’ve been hearing that with each of these trials and it hasn’t happened yet. Remember all the Michael Cohen tapes that where going to “finally get Trump”? Or how so and so was going to “flip” on Trump over such and such? It may happen, but until then it’s just speculation, and in most cases wishful thinking. Grand jury indictments — including the Allen Weisselberg indictment — are not criminal convictions, and we have a long way to go in this story before we get there. And for the folks that would like to see the 45th President perp walked, they are no closer today than they were yesterday, despite what social media will be telling us throughout the forthcoming Allen Weisselberg proceedings.
I actually think Trump’s many detractors (of which I am one) need to be circumspect about continuing to cheer this on. I’m sure plenty of his associates, maybe even him, could be charged with white collar violations and corruption unlikely to have ever been investigated but for his presidency. All this does is keep him relevant when what we should want is for him to fade off. MSNBC ratings aren’t worth keeping Trump front and center in the collective American psyche.Report
Agree, however, my understanding is that Trump businesses are something of a cancer of grift in the NE, consuming much to slake his ego, and returning very little. I understand the desire to try and dismantle it somehow.Report
I won’t shed any tears for its destruction. Still I saw some article the other day about plummeting ratings for cable news since Trump left office. I want this trend to continue, and if I could ever point to a particular reason I voted Biden (beyond the post I wrote here) that’s it. Trump is a cancer on us and we need him cut out, not fed.Report
I highly doubt any action against Trump will stay out of the news, but the DA/AG doesn’t need to hold press conferences.Report
There is an opinion piece on CNN this morning that says the DA should seek a gag order since Trump has a long history of very public savaging of his perceived enemies, and such savaging would possibly taint the trial. Lets hope Cy Vance was reading it.Report
To be honest, my expectations were that unless the DA had a good handle on tens/hundreds of millions of dollars in money laundering, they would just let it go.Report
Early reporting and all that, but…
“The charges are believed to involve fringe benefits given to employees, including Weisselberg, sources said.”
Capone had Tax Evasion; but the coppers finally nabbed Trump on fringies… well, not Trump, but you know.
I have to believe there’s more, because it does kinda beggar the imagination to think that a prosecutor combing through all of Trump’s financial dealings (is this the DA who also got the tax returns?) coming up with Fringe Benefit violations is…?
I mean, my estimation of Trump would go up a notch if he could have a DA crawl up his corporate ass and all they could do was arrest the CFO on excess compensation charges.Report
Lack of indictments after this long IMO speaks for itself, and in the other direction. Obviously I reserve the right to totally change my opinion as facts emerge.Report
Didn’t the prosecutors only get the Trump Organization’s financial records in _March_, when the last appeal failed?
At which point Mazars USA turned over millions of records.
I mean, four months, during a pandemic with restrictions still in place, isn’t that long a time to go through millions of records.Report
I think it’s less ‘That is all they could come up with’ and more ‘This is the _incredibly_ obvious thing they wanted to start with and is a slam dunk in court’, with hopes of getting a cooperating witness to go after more.
All the articles say this is the ‘first’ set of criminal charges.
And ‘fringe benefits’ is a very poor way to describe this. The allegation is Weisselberg (And most senior executives) basically received almost all his income via the Trump Organization paying for everything. His housing, his cars, his grandkids tuition, actual literal _cash_ (!!!)
Like, this isn’t some small possible tax fraud, this is as obvious tax fraud as it can possibly get.Report
My read of the situation regarding the Trump Organization is that, for many, many, MANY years they had an understanding with the NYAG called “Don’t look at my stuff”.
Why they had that understanding is speculative (although I would speculate furiously about how Trump’s go-to move was to use David Pecker to blackmail people into not investigating him, highlighted by brazenly trying it against Jeff Bezos), but it’s clear while the previous AG seemed unable to investigate Trump and his various subsidiaries (even when, as the case with his charity, someone else had literally done all the legwork and dumped the entire “Obvious crime is obvious” onto the public), the current one sees no problem with it.
And judging from what I’ve heard about this indictment, it’s all tax evasion of the most blatant sort, the kind only idiots or those who have spent decades getting away with it are comfortable trying.
Stuff like “How about I just pay your kid’s private school tuition, and since it’s not salary, neither of us pay taxes on it!” kind of tax evasion. Same with renting or giving out apartments either free or below rate, all the sort of tax dodges you associate with a “business owner” with five employees who thinks he’s a genius tries. And whose accountant tries very hard to make him stop doing.Report
Yeah, seriously.
People vastly underestimate how many small business owners try to avoid taxes.
I once spent several days explaining to a small business owner that, no, you do indeed have to collect sales tax on ‘processing fees’, regardless of what they are called, and _I_ wasn’t going to set up his e-commerce system to avoid that…if he wanted to break the law, he could after I left. And I’m not a fricking accountant, I just googled it because obvious tax evasion of ‘selling at a low price and adding a lot in fees to avoid taxes’ is obvious and thus, I assumed, probably not legal!
He, of course, assumed no one had ever thought of that before, I guess. They all think that, that no one has ever thought of the very clever ways they are going to avoid the law. Small business owners are the weirdest sort of pretty-egoists and people who think they are amazingly clever you have ever met, and in reality most of them are just moderately competent at what they do and managed to make a significant pile of money into a pile of money that is slightly larger…or not. They certainly aren’t the geniuses they think they are, and often Dunning-Kruger keeps them from realizing that.
And Trump, for all the money he throws around, is actually exactly that sort of small business owner (I’m not sure I’d call him ‘moderately competent’.)…although his tax evasion is much larger. His ego is much, much larger too, and he’s very sure that no one will ever figure out anything he does, he assumes as he blatantly writes a check from his charity to pay a fine that his business incurred, an actual real thing he did, least we all forget.
Just blatant, obvious, illegal stuff. It’s not weird this stuff is being found.Report
A friend of mine got a surprise divorce about….8 years ago? 10?
And by “surprise” I mean “she thought everything was fine but her husband had been wanting to divorce her for years but had waited until their youngest child started full time kindergarten”
He’d handled the finances and she’d quit her job to care for the kids until they got into public school, as it was financially better than her working with daycare costs, and he made good money.
When he decided, about five years prior, that he wanted a divorce he’s stopped putting money into her retirement accounts and instead doubled up on his. Pretty much every bill, investment, loan, or credit card he pretty much arranged so that he’d spring a divorce on her with him having all the assets, and her having all the debt.
He then popped up with “I want a divorce” followed by “I keep my retirement funds, you keep yours, and we split the house and bills, but I’ll pay you X dollars a month for the first year so you can get on your feet. It’s a better deal than if you get a lawyer, so you shouldn’t bother.”. Not because he thought a lawyer would see through his clever work, but because he truly thought what he’d done was clever, legal, innovative. He’d won at law.
She got a lawyer. Who looked over it all and told her “Your husband is the most common sort of idiot. Judges see this amateur attempts at asset hiding twice a day, every day, during divorces. They have no patience with it.
Your husband just ensured, as I’m guessing his lawyer his explaining to him, that you’ll walk out of this divorce with far more than he does. ”
And she did. She could have gotten more, if she’d gone to court or really pressed him, but she just wanted to walk out with a fair split and primary custody (the 50%+1 of split custody).
Her husband, a rather bright engineer, thought he was a genius who found a divorce loophole no one ever had. You know, hiding martial assets under one name and pretending they weren’t common assets.
And as much of a jerk as he was, he was far, far smarter than Donald Trump.Report
How much of a schemdrik does someone need to be a fall guy Donald Trump?Report
There was a lot money to be made by getting in bed with trump. They knew what he was. If was a quiet white collar criminal he would likely be just fine.Report