It’s not a good day for former President Donald Trump. The Trump Organization and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg was charged by the Manhattan D.A’s office with a list of tax crimes. Prosecutors charged the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 counts, and Weisselberg was hit with 15 felony counts connected with an alleged scheme stretching back to 2005. Weisselberg’s charges include one for grand larceny.
So, what did Donald know about this scheme? Well, according to what former Trump Organization Vice President Barbara Res told MSNBC’s Ari Melber, the twice-impeached one-term president knew a lot. In fact, Trump appears to have directed Res to cook the books.
Melber told Res that Trump’s team basically said that “everybody does this” and asked her to respond.
“No, not everybody does this,” she said.
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“The first time I started working for Trump, one of the first things I encountered was, I was checking expenses of one of our top employees, and they were ridiculous. Where did they come from?” she recalled.
Trump insisted that the expense were legit when she questioned them, but she said she wasn’t signing off on them.
“And finally, told me, Trump told me to just come up with just so much, I forget the amount, a thousand dollars a week or whatever it was in expenses, maybe not that much back then, and they’ll be paid,” she told the MSNBC host. “And they’ll be off the books.”
Watch:
Melber is correct about the Trump Organization’s response to the indictment. The company called its now-indicted CFO a “loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather who has worked at the Trump Organization for 48 years.” And nowhere in the statement did the organization deny the alleged criminal activity.
Instead, the company said, “He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President. The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics.”
Yeah, that’s not a good defense.
Featured image via screen capture
