Allen Weisselberg, the Man Who Knows Donald Trump's Financial Secrets, ...
... Has Agreed to Become a Coöperating Witness
Source: New Yorker
In late 2016, I had lunch with a former high-ranking Trump Organization executive, a person who said he was happy to share dirt on his old boss, but who confessed to not having much dirt to share. This executive wrote a list of people whom I might contact to find out about anything potentially illegal or unethical that Donald Trump may have done. At the bottom of the list was the name Weisselberg. “Allen is the one guy who knows everything,” the person told me. “He’ll never talk to you.” I have had nearly identical conversations with different people who work or have worked for the Trump Organization many times since. They all described his role similarly: Allen Weisselberg, the firm’s longtime chief financial officer, is the center, the person in the company who knows more than anyone.
...
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Weisselberg had been granted immunity by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York so that he could share information in the investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and dealmaker. It is safe to say that the entire world of Trump watchers—those journalists, political folks, and advocates who carefully monitor every bit of Trump news—went bonkers. Weisselberg is the man to whom those people most want to speak. He is also the man who has, for decades, been the most circumspect.
...
This summer, though, Weisselberg’s role in the organization came into sharper focus. In a recording that Michael Cohen made of a conversation he had with Donald Trump about a payment to keep secret an affair, Cohen described setting up a shell company to pay hush money during the 2016 campaign to Karen McDougal, a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Trump. This week, Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance laws, in part by setting up this secretive payment. He said that he knew at the time that it was illegal to secretly make a payment for campaign-related activity, but he did so anyway at Trump’s direction. Strikingly, Cohen makes it clear on the tape that Weisselberg also knew about the shell company and payment. “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” Cohen explains to Trump.
It is difficult to hear the tape and not wonder how Weisselberg developed this particular expertise and whether he had deployed it before. More importantly, it offers more justification for Robert Mueller and other federal, state, and local prosecutors to investigate the Trump Organization’s general business practices. The tape suggests that Weisselberg provided guidance for Cohen’s payment, an illegal act designed to influence the election. Since one of the Mueller investigation’s core aims is to understand whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to sway the 2016 Presidential election, Weisselberg now seems to be a key witness. Worse, for Trump, if Weisselberg, fearing prosecution himself, tells prosecutors of other criminal activity in the organization, that information will likely be referred to other federal and state prosecutors, thus broadening the investigation of Trump’s business.
https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/swamp-chronicles/allen-weisselberg-the-man-who-knows-donald-trumps-financial-secrets-has-agreed-to-become-a-cooperating-witness
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I'll bet he knows all about how Trump laundered money for the Russians in his casinos, back in the the early 1990's. The Feds have been onto the scheme for a long time but they could never bring charges against Trump until they got a key employee to talk about it. Weisselberg should be able to fill that bill.
After the casinos when bankrupt Trump started laundering Russian money by selling them expensive condos and real estate. How they did it was to set up dummy Delaware corporations (holding companies) and keep the names of the owners secret. So there was no paper trail to the oligarchs, but they were all dumping millions into Trump's real estate. Again the FBI has been trying to get a key Trump employee to talk about it and get it all on the record so they could charge him. These crimes are going back 25 or 30 years and Weisselberg has worked for Trump that long.
Mueller probably has everything he needs now that Weisselberg has come in.
