Donald Trump’s company the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg have been hit with a slew of criminal charges including conspiracy, grand larceny, and multiple counts of tax fraud.
While the former US President isn’t yet facing any charges, some say it won’t be long before people close to Trump turn on him to save themselves.
Amherst College law professor and author of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown, Lawrence Douglas, believes prosecutors are trying to entice Weisselberg to do just that and testify against Trump and members of his family.
Photo: 2021 Getty Images
According to the indictment, Weisselberg has worked for the Trump family since 1973.
“What prosecutors typically do when they’re dealing with some sort of organised crime family, and I think that’s what they’re likening the Trump Organization to, is they kind of try to move up the pecking order and try to flip people - they go after the underlings, they charge them, and they then try to get these underlings to flip in order to avoid going to jail themselves,” he says.
Weisselberg pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.
“So far Weisselberg has demonstrated himself to be a kind of good solider and in the past, he has certainly been very, very loyal to Trump and to the organization, but we can also bear in mind that in many ways Michael Cohen, [Trump’s] former personal lawyer, is also a deeply loyal person to Trump but then again the prosecutors succeeded in flipping him.”
Prof Lawrence Douglas Photo: Supplied
He says whether we think it does justice to the kind of alleged offences that Trump has engaged in over the last number of years, tax evasion is a crime. Douglas says there is speculation about whether Trump overvalued his properties for the purposes of securing loans from banks and then systematically undervalued them for the purposes of paying taxes.
A country that has a functioning rule of law must be prepared to take former heads of state to trial if they’ve engaged in crimes, Douglas says.
“You don’t get some special dispensation simply because your crimes weren’t of magnitude that you’d like them to be in order to silence any possible grumble that these are just politically motivated charges.
“We know that Trump is incredibly successful at maintaining loyalty among his supporters. After all, if people didn’t turn on him for basically inspiring an armed insurrection against the capital of the United States for the purposes of overturning a democratic election, you can say they’re probably not going to turn on him when they learned that he cooked the books with regards to some of his properties.”
Douglas hopes moderate voters at least would have had enough of Trump.
“What it’s going to take to convince his diehard supporters that America is a healthier nation without him in power, well that’s going to be a long work in progress.”
