The guilty plea Thursday of former Trump Organization chief financial officer Alan Weiselberg is the latest and biggest development in New York authorities’ years-long investigation into the company run by the former president.
Weiselberg pleaded guilty to 15 counts of tax fraud and will serve five months in prison followed by five years of probation. He will also pay almost $2 million in back taxes and penalties.
As part of his plea deal with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Weiselberg admitted he played a role in enriching himself and other top Trump Organization executives through unrecorded benefits and other measures without accounting for earnings. He has personally avoided paying $1.7 million in taxes over more than a decade through indirect compensation from the Trump Organization.
The case against the Trump Organization itself is set to begin jury selection in October, and Weiselberg will testify in the case.
Legal experts said Weisselberg may not have formally agreed to cooperate, but his testimony could still be valuable to prosecutors advancing their case that the Trump Organization committed financial malfeasance.
Andrew Weissman, a professor of practice at New York University School of Law, said the condition that Weiselberg must testify truthfully to keep his deal intact makes it “much more difficult” for the Trump Organization to defend itself in its case.
“The organization operates through its people,” he said. “This is the CFO saying he did this and these were not crimes unrelated to the organization and the organization benefited directly from it.”
Weissman, who served as the lead prosecutor in special counsel Robert Mueller’s office in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, said Weiselberg’s full cooperation would mean he would have to provide all the information he knows about other crimes, including those unrelated to him and the organization are accused of.
Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance originally filed charges against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization at the same time a year ago. Alvin Bragg took over the case when he became district attorney earlier this year.
Trump himself has not been charged with any crime, although prosecutors have not ruled it out.
Weissman said Weiselberg is “essentially” cooperating with the investigation in this particular case because he will have to take the stand and answer questions about the charges to which he pleaded guilty.
He said the defense was able to limit Weisselberg’s exposure in accepting the deal, preventing him from facing a potentially harsher sentence. He said the sentence could have been the same if Weiselberg had gone to trial and been convicted, but determining what he would have received is difficult to predict in such a high-profile case.
Weissman said Weisselberg’s guilty plea to every count of the indictment he faced was a significant victory for the prosecution.
Danya Perry, a former federal prosecutor, said the Trump Organization’s defense team could try to argue in its case that Weiselberg was motivated to testify against the company, but receiving a five-month sentence and not being fully cooperative makes that more difficult. argument.
She said she did not think Weisselberg would have faced an “incredibly” harsh sentence had he been convicted because of his age – 75 – and the fact that he was a first-time offender.
Perry said that if the case against the organization goes to trial, the former president’s name will come up often and it will be difficult to “pin the needle” that the organization was involved in financial wrongdoing, but he was not.
She said if the firm takes a plea deal, it could apply to the district attorney’s case, but it’s unclear what information might come out in the trial.
“If there is a trial and Weiselberg testifies, who knows what other information will come to light?” Perry asked.
Weissman and Perry said they were concerned that Weisslberg was not granted full immunity for other potential crimes.
“Typically, attorneys negotiate coverage or immunity for any other crimes he may have committed so they can’t come back,” Perry said. “Look, they didn’t do that.”
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Weissman said it’s “standard” for defense attorneys to ask for coverage in a plea deal for other crimes that may have been committed so someone knows “nothing is pending right now.”
He said his exclusion from the settlement was “shocking” and made him believe Bragg more when he said the investigation was ongoing.
“It made me think that we should all take a deep breath and wait to see what happens after the Trump Organization trial and whether other churches are involved,” Weissman said.
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