Part of a broader criminal probe
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with tax-related crimes on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said, which would mark the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago.
Another twig added to the haystack of sleaze that is Trumpworld.
How disgusting it is that this filthy man spent four years telling us what to do.
Word is Trump won’t be charged; Weisselberg has refused to be turned.
This one is about not paying taxes on fringe benefits, which sounds laughably trivial given what we know about Trump, but little acorns, you know.
The tax-related investigation is part of a broader criminal probe into whether the Trump Organization and its officers overvalued and undervalued its assets on loan, tax and insurance documents for financial gain, prosecutors have said. The criminal probe, led by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and civil probe, by the New York attorney general, have looked at financial dealing around some of the same properties, including Mr. Trump’s Seven Springs estate, in Westchester, N.Y., and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the Journal has reported.
Here’s hoping.
According to Ken “RICO” White, of Popehat fame, it’s also incredibly unlikely Trump would have ever been charged. Tax crimes in the US of the kind being investigated are of a class where the specific intent matters, so the government would have to prove the mindset and intentions of the defendant. Trump, being scattershot and scatterbrained, can easily say “My tax guy said to do this; I trust him; I may have bloviated, but I never intended to defraud the government”, and the government cannot really gainsay him.