Former Trump Organization finance director and Donald Trump's right-hand man for decades, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to perjury on Monday, a barely noticeable setback for the former US president and favorite candidate for the Republican nomination in the election. November, the same day he received support from the Supreme Court by allowing him to run for office after the state of Colorado rejected him. Once the mainstay of the family business, Weißelberg became a scapegoat in 2022 to prevent the tax fraud case from hitting his boss: in August of the same year, Weißelberg pleaded guilty in order to achieve a reduced sentence and at the same time save Trump. Now his admission to lying under oath further tarnishes the name of the organization he worked for and that of the former president, who is on an unprecedented judicial offensive as he advances in his party's primaries.
Weisselberg pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury in Manhattan criminal court, where he was handcuffed after turning himself in to authorities early Monday. According to the judge, accepting guilt would mean a prison sentence of five months. The charges stem from his testimony in Trump's civil fraud trial, for which he was recently ordered to pay $355 million plus interest. Weisselberg, 76, said under oath in October that he had nothing to do with the false valuation of Trump's Manhattan penthouse, the famed Trump Tower, one of the tycoon's properties whose value was inflated to obtain loan benefits. In this case, the New York Attorney General, Democrat Letitia James, opened a civil case for which Trump and his two eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, were found guilty last September and fined the said million last month. Dollar penalties. According to the indictment, the fraud lasted at least a decade.
After Weisselberg's testimony in October, Forbes magazine accused him of lying on the witness stand. Based on a review of old emails and notes, the publication showed that the financier had spent several years trying to convince his reporters that the Manhattan apartment – Trump's New York home – was worth more. Trump's 2015 financial disclosure put the luxury penthouse's value at $327 million and argued that it was 2,780 square feet, almost three times its actual size. Prosecutor James described the assessment as “absurd”.
Weisselberg's confession this Monday comes 20 days before Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan in the Stormy Daniels case (the payment of illegal money to the porn actress to silence an extramarital affair). Trump is accused of falsifying business records – the bribe payment was recorded as “legal fees” in the organization's accounts – and will be in court on March 25 in the first of four planned criminal trials. The others are planned in Georgia, Florida and Washington. The one in Manhattan will be the first criminal trial of a former president in US history.
Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's finance director for five decades and one of the tycoon's most loyal cronies, pleaded guilty to 15 counts of tax fraud in a Manhattan court in August 2022 after reaching a shortened plea deal with prosecutors in return Penalty. Weisselberg, who had turned himself in to trial a year earlier, then admitted that he hatched a tax avoidance scheme that defrauded him of $1.76 million in income over 15 years. He also benefited from undeclared benefits in kind, including the rental of a luxury apartment and two luxury vehicles, as well as tuition at exclusive schools for his grandchildren. Until then, the executive branch had refused to implicate Donald Trump in the conspiracy, so his confession was viewed as a diversionary tactic through which Trump allowed his loyal ally to be sacrificed to create a firewall. In January 2023 he was sentenced to five months in prison.
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