Prosecutors in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. have turned their focus to Allen H. Weisselberg, who has served as chief financial officer of the Trump Organization for decades, and are clearly hoping to get him to turn state’s evidence and implicate former President Donald Trump, along with members of his family, according to a report from the New York Times:
“The increased focus on the executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, could step up pressure on him to cooperate with the investigation if the prosecutors unearth evidence of wrongdoing on his part. He has served as the Trump Organization’s financial gatekeeper for more than two decades and could be a vital source of information for the government about the inner workings of the company.
“In recent weeks, the prosecutors working for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., have been interviewing witnesses who know Mr. Weisselberg and have asked at least one witness about Mr. Weisselberg’s sons, Barry and Jack Weisselberg, according to two of the people with knowledge of the matter.”
The idea of placing Weisselberg under the microscope in an effort to convince him to flip on his boss makes perfect sense, according to the former president’s niece, Mary:
Additionally, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman noted that Weisselberg is a key to Vance’s investigation because he “knows where all the bodies are buried.”
Would Weisselberg be willing to sing like a proverbial canary? According to Elie Honig, a former prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, we already know that the Trump Org. CFO is indeed willing to cooperate to make sure he isn’t charged with the Donald’s crimes:
And then there’s this from Andrew Weissmann, who was one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the Russia investigation:
The sudden turn to Weisselberg comes just a week after Vance’s office finally obtained eight years of Trump’s tax returns, along with “millions of pages” of his financial records. Those documents are suspected of containing evidence that Trump and his company committed fraud on an unprecedented scale.
For his part, the former president whined in response to the Manhattan D.A. getting his tax returns:
“For more than two years, New York City has been looking at almost every transaction I’ve ever done, including seeking tax returns which were done by among the biggest and most prestigious law and accounting firms in the U.S.”
However, if Trump has done business by the books and committed no crimes, why did it take the Supreme Court to wrest control of his tax returns away from the Trump Organization? An innocent man would never fight so doggedly to keep such information private. Only a crook with something to hide would go to such lengths.
