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Allen Weisselberg has been removed as an officer from dozens of Trump Organization subsidiaries.
onald Trump has a long history of suddenly pretending not to know people once it’s clear they could get him in serious trouble, despite indisputable evidence that he knows them quite well. Campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who Trump openly praised to The Washington Post? After Papadopoulos was convicted of lying to the FBI about interactions with Russians, Trump told Fox News, “I never even talked to the guy. I didn’t know who he was.” Matthew Whitaker, the guy the then president apparently wanted to do his bidding at the Justice Department (before Bill Barr came along)? Once it became clear that Trump seemingly wanted to use Whitaker to shut down Robert Mueller, Trump claimed, “I don’t know Matt Whitaker,” even though they’d reportedly met more than a dozen times. Campaign manager Paul Manafort? After he was convicted and sentenced to prison, Trump said he “didn’t know Manafort well.” Prince Andrew? “I don’t know him.” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman? “Never even heard of [him].” Lev Parnas? “I don’t even know who this man is.” Anyway, you get the idea.
So really, it’s not at all surprising that Trump appears to be putting some distance between himself and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization CFO charged alongside the company this month, given the possibility of Weisselberg suddenly flipping and informing on Trump, or simply making the company look bad with a guilty conviction. Shortly after being terminated as director of Trump’s Scottish golf club, Weisselberg has been removed from leadership roles at dozens of Trump Organization subsidiaries. Per The Washington Post:
The changes were made Thursday and Friday, a week after a grand jury in Manhattan indicted Weisselberg on 15 felony counts, including grand larceny and tax fraud. Weisselberg was accused by New York prosecutors of helping run a 15-year scheme to evade income taxes by concealing executives’ salaries—including more than $1.7 million of his own income—from tax authorities.… [The] subsidiaries included a holding company that owns many Trump businesses, a corporate entity that handles payroll for many Trump employees, and even a Trump project in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that went bust more than a decade ago.
Previously, Weisselberg had shared the leadership of these companies with one of former president Donald Trump’s adult sons or, in the case of the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., with Trump himself. Now, records show, the Trump family members are left in charge.… The removal of Weisselberg’s name from these corporate filings could avoid questions from regulators, lenders, or vendors by leaving out the name of an indicted executive.
As former federal prosecutor Daniel Zelenko told The Wall Street Journal, it’s not generally realistic for a company to keep a CFO in place after a criminal indictment. “How are insurers and lenders going to rely on what the CFO tells them?” said Zelenko. “It creates a lot of challenges for a company continuing to do business.”
For now Weisselberg, who has been accused of evading $900,000 in taxes on more than $1.7 million of income, largely through fringe benefits that were never reported to the IRS, like cars, an apartment, and private school tuition, remains employed by the parent company, and a person familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, “he‘s going to remain” there. Weisselberg, who, like the Trump Organization, pleaded not guilty to all the charges, has also indicated that he will not cooperate with prosecutors against the ex-president.
On the other hand, he’s facing more than a decade in prison if convicted. And as former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne told MSNBC last week, “The jury will hate [Weisselberg]. He’s not going to have a jury of people who go to MAGA rallies, he’s going to have a cross section of people who live in Manhattan, who do pay Manhattan taxes, who don’t get free Mercedes, who don’t have somebody else paying for their children’s education and not have tax ramifications for that. So I think he will be a very hated defendant, Mr. Weisselberg, and I’m sure his defense attorneys have told him so.” Meanwhile, as former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara opined, “I am optimistic he’ll be convicted. The law is fairly clear on what is income & what is taxable. He’s a sophisticated executive; mistake is implausible. The company booked much of it as income. And juries hate rich tax cheats.” So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Weisselberg is at least considering a scenario in which he cuts a deal, and that Trump will one day, in the not too distant future, claim of a man who’s worked for his company for decades: “Never heard of him.”
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