Lee Heidhues 6.30.2021
It’s about time. Reminds me of the 1993 film The Firm based on the John Grisham novel. The bad guys, who happen to be lawyers, get busted in the end having done fraudulent client billing and sent the invoices via USPS. Translation – Mail Fraud via Interstate commerce and a violation of the law. Whatever it takes.
Didn’t Al Capone end up in Alcatraz for tax fraud?
I commend Cyrus Vance and the New York AG for continuing their relentless and diligent pursuit of this guy, Trump. His accounting in a Court of law is long overdue and richly deserved.
This is only the beginning. Trump is finally being held to account for his decades of cruelty, lies and financial misdeeds.
“It’s only the beginning what I want to feel forever..only just the start..” sang the group Chicago in their 1969 debut album with the song, “Beginnings.”
Excerpted from the New York Times 6.30.2021
The former president’s family business and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, are expected to appear in court on Thursday.
A grand jury in Manhattan has indicted Donald J. Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, and one of its top executives in connection with a tax investigation into fringe benefits handed out at the company, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
The specific charges against the company and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, were not immediately clear. The indictment was expected to be unsealed Thursday afternoon after Mr. Weisselberg and lawyers for the Trump Organization were set to appear in court.
But prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office have been examining bonuses and luxury perks that Mr. Weisselberg received — including an apartment in Manhattan, leased Mercedes-Benz cars and private school tuition for at least one of his grandchildren — and whether taxes should have been paid on those benefits.
The indictment is a major development in the investigation led by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., who has been conducting a sweeping inquiry into Mr. Trump and his business dealings along with the New York State attorney general, Letitia James.
It will amplify the pressure that prosecutors have placed on Mr. Weisselberg for months to turn on Mr. Trump and cooperate with their investigation. In nearly a half-century of service to Mr. Trump’s family businesses, Mr. Weisselberg, 73, has survived — and thrived — by anticipating and carrying out his boss’s dictates in a zealous mission to protect the bottom line.
Interviews with 18 current and former associates of Mr. Weisselberg, as well as a review of legal filings, financial records and other documents, paint a portrait of a man whose unflinching devotion to Mr. Trump will now be put to the test.
“Allen is a soldier,” said John Burke, a former Trump executive who worked with Mr. Weisselberg in the early 1990s. “Allen was good at doing what Donald wanted him to do.”
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