The key to making a criminal case against former President Donald Trump is getting his company’s chief financial officer to flip, according to a top prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation.
There are multiple investigations looking into the 45th president, but Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel, sees the most promise in the one being run by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who is looking for possible bank, tax, or insurance fraud.
Weissmann told New York magazine that securing the cooperation of Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg will be essential to the prospect of prosecution because of his inside involvement in Trump’s business affairs.
“I think a really important piece is going to be flipping the CFO, Weisselberg,” Weissmann said. “I think that is going to just be so critical in terms of being able to deal with Trump’s defense of, ‘I didn’t know,’ or ‘Weisselberg was signing off on things, so I had no criminal intent. Who am I to second-guess accounting and legal issues?'”
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“That is really important, unless you have tapes or a paper trail, to have an insider,” he added. “I just think it’s too early to really speculate until you know whether he’s flipped or not. If he flips, I think that this case is going to be made.”
Last week, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office seized the financial records of Jessica Weisselberg, the former daughter-in-law of Weisselberg. She was subpoenaed to produce records for her ex-husband’s bank accounts, credit cards, and statements related to his net worth and taxes, specifically for those related to the Trump Organization and Wollman Rink, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by the Washington Post.
Jessica Weisselberg, who was married to Barry Weisselberg, the son of Allen Weisselberg, from 2004 to 2018, said last month that she believed her former father-in-law will “turn on” Trump because his children’s connections to the Trump Organization hold too much criminal liability.
Weissmann, who played an instrumental role in winning convictions against former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates during the Russia investigation and later lamented how he believed that the special counsel “could have done more” to hold Trump accountable, also acknowledged a weakness to Alan Weisselberg flipping.
“We also knew there’s a downside to put somebody like that on and he becomes the target where people say, ‘That’s the key witness.’ That will happen with Weisselberg if he flips,” he said. “It’ll be like, ‘He’s saving his skin or he’s saving his children’ or whatever it is. And that’s sort of a standard defense, which is tried and true. And that’s what you do as a defense lawyer, and there’s nothing wrong with that as an argument, and the government has to deal with that and find enough corroboration as to why he’s telling the truth.”
Similar to how he reacted to Mueller’s inquiry, Trump has dubbed Vance’s investigation a “witch hunt,” and after the Supreme Court rejected his effort to keep his tax records from New York prosecutors in February, the former president insisted, “We will win!”
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The Trump Organization is also under investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump denies any wrongdoing and in February decried what he dubbed a “new phenomenon of ‘headhunting’ prosecutors and AGs.”
The Trump Organization hired Ronald Fischetti, a New York criminal defense attorney, last week. Fischetti is a former law partner of Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor working on Vance’s investigation. Morgan Magionos, a former FBI forensic accountant who was part of Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is also assisting New York prosecutors in their inquiry, according to CNN.
