The Manhattan district attorney’s office — which already has charged Donald Trump with 34 felony counts in relation to the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme — has upped the ante against a potential cooperator in that case, according to a New York Times report on Friday that cited people with knowledge of the matter.
Because former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg apparently has not signaled any willingness to testify against Trump, the DA’s office has turned “in recent weeks” to exploring perjury charges against him, two of the people with knowledge of the matter told the Times.
Those charges would be in addition to, not in lieu of, any insurance fraud charges, which the DA’s team has been investigating for several months, if not longer. Indeed, prosecutors already have warned Weisselberg’s lawyers that such charges could be forthcoming and that they focus on Weisselberg’s alleged lies to an insurance company “by claiming that the value of the Trump Organization’s real estate holdings had been assessed by an independent appraiser, when in fact they had not been,” the Times reported.
The potential perjury charges, by contrast, “would center on Mr. Weisselberg’s 2020 interview with [Attorney General Leticia] James’s investigators,” during which he was “questioned about some significant errors in Mr. Trump’s financial statements,” the Times reported, citing the people with knowledge of the matter.
But what exactly could Weisselberg have potentially lied about during that interview? After all, the Times notes that Weisselberg “acknowledged that the Trump Organization had overvalued Mr. Trump’s penthouse apartment in Trump Tower by ‘give or take’ $200 million,” but that statement has been understood as an admission of the truth, not a lie in and of itself.
Let’s start with the fact that Weisselberg was interviewed by the attorney general’s office three times in 2020: on July 16, July 17, and September 24….
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