Monday marks the start of the Manhattan, New York, criminal trial of the Trump Organization for tax fraud. If all of the investigations and charges surrounding coup plotter Donald Trump have begun to blur together at this point, you can be forgiven. If even the "for tax fraud" part doesn't narrow it down, that's also more on Trump than on you.
This one is the criminal trial in which the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has agreed to a plea deal that will see him testify that he enriched himself to the tune of $1.7 million dollars worth of unreported perks, ranging from rent payments to private school tuition to, of course, luxury cars, hiding those payments so that neither he nor the company he was a chief financial officer of would have to pay taxes. Weisselberg is pleading guilty in exchange for his testimony against the Trump Organization and the Trump Payroll Corporation.
And before you get your hopes up about any of it, none of this is going to so much as put a scratch in the seditionist family's fortunes. The New York Times notes that the maximum penalty Trump's empire will face is also roughly $1.7 million, which is probably not much more than Trump spends on Rust-Oleum hair spray in a given year. Nobody in Trump's family will be facing criminal penalties themselves, even though we can all guess that the response to Allen Weisselberg telling Donald, "I want a new car," would assuredly be, "Just keep it off the books, I'm not paying taxes on that." And Weisselberg is still refusing to testify about the bigger Trump Organization crimes, the ones where Donald is accused of a lifetime of book-cooking in which he vastly inflated his fortune when applying for bank loans while shrinking the numbers when reporting them for tax purposes.
That one's a civil trial, not criminal, because district attorney Alvin Bragg put a likely-permanent hold on planned criminal charges against Trump when he came into office, a move that resulted in resignations from the prosecutors leading the case. New York Attorney General Letitia James instead went forward with $250 million worth of civil charges against Trump, his family, and his companies.
Weisselberg, who is still on paid leave with the Trump Organization as he testifies against it, appears to be banking on continued loyalty to Trump as his best option. He may face several months of jail time for the charges he's pled guilty to, but he's still collecting a paycheck and can expect to be rewarded handsomely if Grifty McTreasonboy regains the White House. (Most of us would probably agree to a few months in white-collar prison in exchange for $1.7 million. We'd agree to it for half of that, if the cell had good internet connectivity.)
As the Trump Organization's criminal trial gets underway with jury selection, isn't even the only Trump-related trail to see action today. Trump ally, foreign policy adviser, and inauguration chair Tom Barrack Jr., one of the approximately eleventy-billion Republican moneymen to be accused of brazen financial crimes since Trump appeared on the scene, is expected to testify Monday in his own federal criminal trial. He is one of the, again, seemingly uncountably many Trump associates now accused of being an undisclosed foreign agent; Barrack was lobbying on behalf of the United Arab Emirates as he worked to water down Republican Party policies for the benefit of that nation and others, and now stands charged with both that unregistered lobbying and with repeatedly lying his ass off to federal investigators looking into it.
It's not looking good for Barrack right now, but who knows? It's possible Trump is drafting up a "pardon" for his friend on a Mar-a-Lago napkin right now, backdating it to the last days of his presidency. Napkin pardons for everybody!
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