Allen Weisselberg will enter a guilty plea today, the second time in 18 months that Manhattan’s progressive Democratic DA has prosecuted the Trump confidant.
As we related last month, Manhattan’s Democratic district attorney Alvin Bragg’s strategy, as he gears up for his hush-money prosecution of Donald Trump, is to make an impression on potential witnesses who might be favorably disposed toward the former president, or at least reluctant to provide damaging testimony against him.
At the top of that list is former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who, the New York Times reports, is about to plead guilty to perjury charges. It will be the second time in 18 months that Bragg has prosecuted him.
Despite his notoriety as the elected progressive prosecutor who shuns or downgrades charges against hardcore criminals, Bragg has been on a mission to bludgeon Weisselberg into cooperating in the DA’s quest to nail Trump. Last year, Bragg induced the Trump CFO to plead guilty to multiple felony tax counts, which were used as a predicate for convicting the Trump organization of analogous charges. But to the prosecutor’s frustration, Weisselberg refused to implicate Trump personally in any wrongdoing.
Although Weisselberg’s case was non-violent, and although Bragg’s progressive philosophy favors alternatives to incarceration even in some violent-crime cases, the DA had the 76-year-old detained at Rikers Island for a few months to get his mind right. It doesn’t seem to have done the trick.
As we extensively covered, another ambitious elected progressive Democrat, New York attorney general Letitia James, brought a massive civil-fraud lawsuit against Trump, Weisselberg, and other Trump Organization executives — a case that Bragg had declined to bring criminally, to the consternation of Democrats. Indeed, it was in the aftermath of that uproar that Bragg decided to revive the previously mothballed hush-money caper and become the first-ever prosecutor to indict a former American president. (Other Democratic prosecutors have since indicted Trump three more times.)
Weisselberg testified during the civil trial, in which Judge Arthur Engoron, an elected progressive Democrat, ultimately imposed a staggering $454 million “disgorgement” fine against Trump. Incredibly, Weisselberg claimed that he had little to do with the gross exaggeration of the value of his former boss’s Trump Tower triplex in Manhattan. Reporting by Forbes put the lie to the CFO’s claim not to have paid much mind to the digs, which though measured at less than 11,000 square feet, were estimated to be 30,000 square feet in area — and thus supposedly worth $327 million, a ludicrous value inflation.
It soon leaked that Bragg was contemplating a perjury case against Trump — more as a shot across the bow of the Trump camp than a renewed effort to squeeze cooperation out of Weisselberg. Sure enough, Weisselberg is reportedly pleading guilty to perjury today.
Persistent to the end, the above-linked Times report indicates that, in admitting to false testimony, Weisselberg will not implicate Trump. The report adds that the former CFO was rewarded with a $2 million severance package when he retired from the Trump Organization. A key term of the package: Weisselberg has committed not to cooperate with investigations of Trump unless legally forced to do so.