On Thursday the Trump Organisation’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony charges (crimes regarded in the US as more serious than a misdemeanour) and has agreed to give evidence against his former employers. This concerns tax fraud charges brought against the company by the authorities in the state of New York. Weisselberg has been ‘flipped’ in the jargon and in return for testifying against the business he worked for, he will receive a 5 month prison sentence and 5 years probation. This is a fraction of the 15 years he could have faced.
Plea bargaining is a tactic used frequently by US prosecutors to threaten smaller fish and force them to provide evidence against bigger ones further up the chain. They do this until they get the men at the top.
"Weisselberg and the Trump Organization were indicted last year by authorities in New York who charged them with concealing certain financial compensation as part of what they called a years-long scheme to avoid paying taxes."
Technically, I understand his evidence will be against the company not Trump himself but investigators have said there is at least one "tax cheat" bigger than Weisselberg in the company, which presumably can only be Trump himself or one of his two sons.
The CFO has obviously been presented with credible evidence which would ordinarily mean a long stretch so there must be significant crimes involved and Trump will surely find it hard to argue he didn’t know about them - although that won't stop him trying..
Next, on the insurrection on inauguration day in 2021, it looks as if Trump's vice president Mike Pence might be persuaded to give evidence to the senate committee looking into the horrendous events on Capitol Hill on 6 January when rioters stormed the congress building.
Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman and the eldest daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, is no friend of Trump. She is vice chair of the 6 January committee and in a recent interview said they had been in touch with counsel representing Pence about his appearance. Pence has remained silent so far but if he does agree to speak out it will be a big moment for Trump and the Republican party.
Pence had been a loyal VP right up to the very last moment and if he 'flips' you can be sure the end is in sight.
Although this week Cheney lost the Republican primary election in Wyoming, ousted by a pro-Trump candidate, she remains a congresswoman until the mid-term elections in November and will take pleasure in defenestrating Trump if she can.
To add to even more his woes, yesterday, a federal appeals court ruled that the Department of Justice (DoJ) must publish an internal memo that senior lawyers at the department prepared in 2019 about whether or not Trump’s actions during the 2016 presidential campaign amounted to crimes prosecutors would ordinarily charge. This concerned Russian interference in the campaign as revealed in the comprehensive Mueller report at the time.
Trump’s Attorney General William Barr ruled that a sitting president could not be prosecuted - and he wasn't.
But now investigators will get to see the advice Barr was given by senior US government law officers and whether or not prosecutors believed there was enough evidence to charge Trump. If so, he could easily find himself facing more serious crimes. It would open up a whole new front in his continuing legal battles..
Next, in Georgia where there is an ongoing investigation over Trump's attempts after the 2020 presidential election to persuade the Republican State Governor to 'find' nearly 12,000 votes to swing the state in his favour, a group connected to his lawyers allegedly hacked the electronic voting system.
The Washington Post said, "Donald Trump-allied attorneys directed a team of computer experts to copy sensitive data from Georgia election systems, part of a broader trend of assorted GOP efforts to copy such data, The Post reported Monday."
Election authorities in Georgia have said the copies posed a security risk and could be used to build false narratives about the integrity of the vote.
All of this is fraction of what The Washington Post describes as the "churning legal maelstrom still surrounding Trump and his close allies, with local, state and federal authorities scrutinizing everything from his namesake business to his handling of classified government documents since leaving office."
We still don't know why he wanted top secret nuclear documents. And on that front this week media organisations seem to have failed in a legal bid to get the original affidavit authorising the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago made public.
On Thursday, a federal judge said he is inclined to "unseal at least some of the probable cause affidavit" and he ordered the government to submit proposed redactions.
“On my initial careful review ... there are portions of it that can be unsealed,” Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart said after a hearing where a top government lawyer contended the document's release could jeopardize an investigation that is still in its "early stages."
The wheels of justice may grind slowly but they are getting closer and closer to Trump.
