As Cop-Beating Illegal Aliens Go Free, DA Bragg Plans Another Prosecution of Trump’s 76-Year-Old CFO

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is pressuring former president Donald Trump’s chief financial officer to plead guilty yet again, according to a New York Times report.

Last year, Bragg’s office induced Allen Weisselberg, a longtime Trump Organization executive, to plead guilty to 15 tax charges so trifling that he was sentenced to all of 100 days in jail (in the main, the case involved failing to pay taxes on perks).

Of course, that is a significant sentence in Bragg’s Manhattan, where the laws often go minimally enforced, if enforced at all, against hardened criminals. Only yesterday, for example, a group of fighting-age male illegal aliens in the country thanks to Biden’s border crisis smirked and flipped their middle fingers at onlookers as they strutted out of Manhattan court after being released, without bail, following their vicious beating of two NYPD cops near Times Square.

While assaults on police are not a priority for him, Bragg, an elected Democrat, is committed to nailing Donald Trump. So he turned the screws on Weisselberg. While even violent offenders often evade incarceration in Manhattan, the 76-year-old was locked up in Rikers Island for three months after pleading guilty to the minor, non-violent crimes, as Bragg pressured him to testify against Trump. While Weisselberg claimed not to have inculpatory information against Trump himself, he was a useful witness in Bragg’s prosecution of the Trump Organization, which was convicted of minor tax offenses similar to Weisselberg’s. (Once the CFO admits to crimes, it is not difficult for a prosecutor to make a case on the company, though most do not do so since going after a business usually harms employees who are innocent of any wrongdoing. But remember, this is New York prosecutors and Trump’s business we’re talking about.)

While Weisselberg was detained at Rikers, Bragg’s prosecutors continued to pressure him, warning that he could face perjury charges at some point. That threat seemed to fade away but was recently revived. There appear to be two explanations for this.

First, prosecutors and their colleagues at elected Democratic attorney general Letitia James’s office are unhappy with testimony that Weisselberg gave during the trial of James’s civil fraud case against Trump. (We are awaiting the verdict in that case, soon to be rendered by Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron, another elected Democrat.)

Second, because the federal prosecutions against Trump have bogged down in appeals and other complexities (because the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel concocted extravagant legal theories in his quest to get Trump convicted before Election Day), it suddenly appears as if Bragg’s business-records fraud indictment of Trump may go to trial in March after all.

It is not believed that Bragg is banking on testimony from Weisselberg in his Trump prosecution. It does appear, though, that putting Trump’s finance guy through the ringer yet again could be Bragg’s way of warning potential defense witnesses that testifying in Trump’s behalf could carry legal peril.

It appears that Bragg is squeezing Weisselberg for a guilty plea to felony perjury or some lesser misdemeanor charge. The Times reporters — there are three of them on this story of truly blockbuster proportions — acknowledge that they are not certain of exactly what testimony Bragg could be charged over. They strongly suggest, however, that it involves the preposterous overvaluation of Trump’s Manhattan apartment.

While AG James has been unable to establish that any counterparty was defrauded by Trump’s gamesmanship in valuing assets, her lawsuit has highlighted that the former president claimed that his Trump Tower residence in pricey midtown was 30,000 square feet; in reality, it is less than 11,000 square feet.

In trial testimony, Weisselberg implausibly claimed that he had “never focused” on the dwelling. This apparently echoed statements that Weisselberg made to James’s investigators, also under oath, in 2020. Yet, the Times relates, after Weisselberg testified in the civil fraud trial, Forbes magazine reported that his statements were false.

Forbes, of course, periodically publishes lists of America’s wealthiest people — inclusion in which Trump has been known to covet recognition. The magazine elaborated that, for several years, Weisselberg “played a key role in trying to convince” Forbes about the value of the apartment. (As I’ve explained, the exaggeration of the square footage was obviously intended to support Trump’s ludicrous claim that his apartment was worth $327 million; at the time the record sale in New York City of a comparable property was $88 million.)

The Times concludes its dispatch with refreshing bluntness about Bragg’s hardball tactics. The reporters say the DA’s minions offered Weisselberg a way out of his predicament: “Cooperate with the district attorney’s office against Mr. Trump and avoid further jail time. Mr. Weisselberg still didn’t budge.”

It is not yet clear whether or when Weisselberg will plead guilty. Meanwhile, Trump’s trial in the hush-money case is scheduled to commence on March 25.

That prosecution involves the booking of reimbursement in 2017 for $130,000 in hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 campaign (the woman, Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. “Stormy Daniels,” credibly claims to have had a tryst with Trump a decade earlier). If what Trump did is a crime at all (which is not certain), it should have been deemed a single misdemeanor transaction that was time-barred under the two-year statute of limitations; instead, Bragg charged each relevant piece of paper as a separate crime, thus inflating the case into 34 charges that he dubiously frames as felonies in an effort to squeeze the case under the wire of a five-year statute of limitations.

The March 25 trial date once seemed improbable. Understandably Bragg has been in no hurry to try a case that is ridiculously overcharged and, given the DA’s non-prosecution philosophy, nakedly political. But with legal esoterica that may take months to resolve bogging down the federal criminal cases — particularly the election-interference case in Washington, D.C., that Democrats had hoped would start in early March — the field seems open for Bragg’s case against Trump to start on or close to schedule.

Thus is Allen Weisselberg getting attention from DA Bragg that cop-bashing “migrants” do not.