Donald J. Trump’s family real estate business was convicted on Tuesday of tax fraud and other financial crimes, a remarkable rebuke of the former president’s company and what prosecutors described as its “culture of fraud and deception.”
The conviction on all 17 counts, after more than a day of jury deliberations in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, resulted from a long-running scheme in which the Trump Organization doled out off-the-books luxury perks to some executives: They received fancy apartments, leased Mercedes-Benzes, even private school tuition for relatives, none of which they paid taxes on.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which led the case against two Trump Organization entities, had previously extracted a guilty plea from the architect of the scheme, Allen H. Weisselberg, the company’s long-serving chief financial officer. Mr. Weisselberg, one of the former president’s most loyal lieutenants, testified as the prosecution’s star witness, but never implicated Mr. Trump.
While prosecutors stopped short of indicting the former president, they invoked his name throughout the monthlong trial, telling jurors that he personally paid for some of the perks and even approved a crucial aspect of the scheme. The prosecution also sounded a drumbeat of damning evidence that spotlighted his company’s freewheeling culture, revealing that pervasive illegality unfolded under Mr. Trump’s nose for years.
The company’s conviction — coupled with the prosecution’s explosive claim at trial that Mr. Trump was “explicitly sanctioning tax fraud” — could now reverberate through the 2024 presidential race, providing early fodder for opponents and their attack ads.
It also might lay the groundwork for the district attorney’s office to intensify its wider criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s business practices — and hush money paid to a porn star who said she had an affair with him — an inquiry that gained momentum in recent months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The conviction on charges of tax fraud, a scheme to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records is hardly a death sentence for the Trump Organization. The maximum penalty it faces is $1.62 million, what amounts to a rounding error for Mr. Trump, who typically notched hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during his presidency.
Yet the verdict represents a highly public reckoning for the Trump Organization, forever branding it as a felonious enterprise. A company that served as a launching pad for the former president’s tabloid celebrity, his star turn on “The Apprentice” and ultimately his political career, might now be best known for its conviction, rather than the hotels and golf clubs that Mr. Trump spent a generation building.
The former president has blamed it all on a politically motivated witch hunt. But while his attacks on prosecutors might appeal to his most loyal voters, lenders and the broader business world might now shun his company.
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Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, which never received a cent from the former president, moved an estimated $2.8 million of donor money into the Trump Organization—including at least $81,000 since Trump lost the election.
And then, on Sept. 21 — the same day James filed the civil action against the Trump Organization — the Republican’s company filed paperwork to register the new company in New York.
Its name: Trump Organization II. I’m not kidding. That’s the actual name.
In a written statement, James argued that the former president’s operation has continued with its fraudulent business practices in the weeks since the civil case was filed. Just as notably, she added that the Trump Organization also “appears to be taking steps to restructure its business to evade the reaches” of the ongoing case, and has “refused to provide any assurance that it will not seek to move assets out of New York to evade legal accountability.” James added:
“Specifically, [the office of the state attorney general] is seeking an order that would prohibit the Trump Organization from submitting a statement of financial condition or other asset disclosure for Mr. Trump to lenders and insurers, either to satisfy existing obligations or to obtain new financing and insurance, that fails to adequately disclose the assumptions and techniques used for valuing his assets, as outlined in the complaint. The order would also prohibit the Trump Organization from transferring any material asset to a non-party affiliate or otherwise disposing of a material asset without court approval.”
Alina Habba, a lawyer representing Trump in the case, said in a statement that the business “has no intention of doing anything improper.”
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