The First Glimmer of Accountability
The indictment unsealed on Thursday in New York does not charge Donald Trump personally. It addresses only a small slice of alleged wrongdoing by the organization named after him and which, for most of his life, he ran. It doesn’t speak to any of the numerous instances of misconduct and potential criminality that took place during Trump’s presidency, nor should it be understood as a referendum on that misconduct. But it offers the first glimmer of accountability, all the same.
Trump and his businesses have sparked so many law-enforcement investigations over the past five years that they can be difficult to keep track of. This case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, began in 2018 in response to the federal charges against Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer. Cohen pleaded guilty to a scheme to violate campaign-finance law by paying women who once had sexual relationships with Trump to stay quiet in the run-up to the 2016 election. Later, testifying before Congress, Cohen accused the Trump Organization of putting forward misleading valuations on real-estate properties in order to get favorable bank loans and avoid taxes. These allegations piqued the interest of New York investigators.
But the indictment released on Thursday against Weisselberg, who pleaded not guilty, and the Trump Organization, which did the same, pulls on neither of those threads. Instead, it has a narrower focus, sketching a conspiracy within the organization to allow executives to skirt taxes by gifting them benefits that were not tabulated as official income. In other words, the company allegedly paid executives off the books—collectively denying New York City, New York State, and the federal government hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. It’s hard not to think of The New York Times report that Trump paid only $750 in income tax in 2017, or of Trump’s 2016 response to an accusation by Hillary Clinton that he had dodged paying taxes for years: “That makes me smart,” he declared.
According to prosecutors, Weisselberg lived rent-free in an apartment paid for by the Trump Organization; his grandchildren’s school tuition was covered by the organization, in some cases by checks signed by Trump himself; he and his wife drove Mercedes-Benzes subsidized by the company. None of this was declared as compensation. The indictment describes a spreadsheet kept by the organization to calculate which portions of Weisselberg’s income should remain hidden from authorities. The level of alleged fraud is “jaw-dropping,” said the University of Chicago’s Daniel Hemel, who studies tax law.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-first-glimmer-of-accountability/ar-AALJlTl