The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of the Trump Organization is heating up with a handful of new subpoenas.
Prosecutors are seeking the personal bank records of the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, in hopes of getting him to cooperate in their criminal probe of the company, the New York Times reported.
The D.A., Cyrus Vance, is investigating whether Trump manipulated property values in exchange for loans and tax benefits, which could justify a fraud charge. Should the financial records of Weisselberg, who has worked at the company for decades, reveal any wrongdoing, they could give Vance’s team a glimpse into the inner workings of the company, according to the report.
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Extra eyes have been on Weisselberg since early March, when Vance began looking into whether he and other employees at the Trump Organization were involved in hush money payments to two women who said they’d had affairs with Trump. A year before that, former Trump counsel Michael Cohen fingered Weisselberg at congressional hearings as a company executive whom investigators should check out.
Vance’s team is looking, in part, for financial records that could be compared to disclosures that the company made to lenders and local tax authorities and determine whether those authorities were misled. The organization failed to turn over ledgers for more than two dozen properties over the last year, the Times reported.
The investigation into whether Trump inflated the value of real estate assets to borrow more against them, and deflated them to reduce their tax bills, ramped up in February, when Vance subpoenaed New York City Tax Commission records.
[NYT] — Cordilia James