Prosecutors say Trump Org offered map to indictment
In prosecutors’ telling, the Trump Organization provided a road map for its own indictment.
In documents filed in New York Supreme Court last week, prosecutors claimed the company had spent 15 years paying its chief financial officer “off the books,” giving him cars, an apartment, tuition payments and cash that were hidden from income tax authorities.
But at the same time, according to allegations included in the indictment, the Trump Organization also was keeping internal
spreadsheets that tallied the payments that were being hidden.
Prosecutors treated the spreadsheets as the accounting equivalent of a confession. They said the ledgers themselves showed the size of the fraud, estimating CFO Allen Weisselberg alone had avoided paying more than $900,000 in taxes. And that concealment, they said, showed the Trump Organization knew it was wrong.
“There is no clearer example of a company that should be held to criminal account,” Carey Dunne, a prosecutor with the office of the Manhattan district attorney, said as authorities charged the company and Mr. Weisselberg with 15 felony counts.
Yet Thursday’s indictment left many questions unanswered.
Will anyone else be charged? Has the investigation narrowed to tax evasion alone? What about other topics prosecutors earlier indicated in court filings they were investigating?
Still, legal experts say, the spreadsheets described on Thursday — and the narrow tax-evasion case they support — could cast a long shadow over former President Donald Trump and his company.
Prosecutors have long indicated their desire to persuade Mr. Weisselberg, people with knowledge of the case have said, to “flip” and reduce his own legal liability by agreeing to testify against Mr. Trump and his company. And experts said the spreadsheets — at least as described by prosecutors — made the case against Mr. Weisselberg sound daunting for him.
“If you pay your employees under the table, a good rule of thumb is not to write it down,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Mr. Hemel said the ledger is likely to have made the decision to bring charges an easy one for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney
General Letitia James, both Democrats: “It’s a big amount of money. It’s blatant violation of the law, and it’s well documented.”
Mr. Trump himself has not been charged in the case; in Thursday’s arraignment, Mr. Dunne said the company’s “former CEO” — possibly referring to Mr. Trump — had personally signed “many of the illegal compensation checks.” The charging documents said Mr. Weisselberg orchestrated the scheme with “others” from the company but did not say who.
Since the indictments were handed up by a Manhattan grand jury, Mr. Trump and those close to him have derided them as the last fizzle of a failed investigation. They have argued after not finding any evidence of criminal activity, Mr. Vance and Ms. James simply dressed up normal corporate behavior — giving out perks to top employees — as a crime to hurt Mr. Trump.
At a Saturday night rally in Sarasota, Fla., Mr. Trump followed in that vein, accusing prosecutors of “weaponizing” the law against him. But he did not dispute their accusations.
“You didn’t pay tax on the car or a company apartment. You used an apartment because you need an apartment because you have to travel too far where your house is. You didn’t pay tax. Or education for your grandchildren,” he said.
“Murder’s OK. Human trafficking, no problem. But fringe benefits — you can’t do that.”
His son Donald Trump Jr. earlier compared the case to the Russian government’s imprisonment of opposition leader and Putin critic Alexei Navalny.
“This is the political persecution of a political enemy,” Mr. Trump Jr. said in a Thursday night television interview on Fox News. “This is what Vladimir Putin does.”
During an arraignment hearing Thursday, Mr. Dunne told Judge Juan Merchan the indictments were not driven by partisanship. “Politics has no role in the grand jury chamber,” Mr. Dunne said.
Alan Futerfas, a Trump Organization attorney, declined to comment about the internal spreadsheets, as did Mary Mulligan, a Weisselberg attorney.
Spokespeople for Mr. Vance and Ms. James — whose offices recently teamed up after years of investigating Mr. Trump’s business practices separately — also declined to comment.
The case against Mr. Trump’s company and Mr. Weisselberg could last well into next year and beyond, legal experts said, because the already balky New York state courts have been further slowed by delays and precautions adopted to protect against the spread of coronavirus. In addition, on Thursday, Mr. Weisselberg’s attorneys said they would need to review potentially millions of pages of evidence in the case, which could further slow the proceedings.
Mr. Futerfas, representing the Trump Organization, said the hard drives turned over Thursday by prosecutors, which represented just the start of document transfers, “might contain literally millions of documents,” and he argued the defense needed more time to delve into them before beginning to file pretrial motions in the case.
“I can’t begin to fathom how much material that the defense attorneys in this case are going to have to sift through,” Mark Bederow, a New York criminal defense lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor, said.
The next hearing in the case is set for Sept. 20.
Mr. Vance and Ms. James have said their investigations will continue in the meantime, but they have not said much about the direction of their further investigations.