Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen said there’s no way that Allen Weisselberg—the senior Trump Organization adviser who pleaded guilty on Thursday to all 15 charges in a New York tax case—can avoid implicating former President Donald Trump in his testimony as a prosecution witness when Trump’s company goes to trial on related charges in the fall.
Appearing on CNN on Thursday, Cohen pointed out that because the Trump Organization is eponymous with the former president, “there will be no way for Allen Weisselberg to answer questions, honestly and truthfully, without implicating Donald, the [Trump] children and others.”
Earlier in the day, Weisselberg entered a plea bargain with prosecutors of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office that required him to plead guilty to evading taxes on a free apartment, lease payments on a luxury car and school tuition for his grandchildren. The deal will also require him to testify as a star witness when trial begins in October.
“They’re going to ask him questions, and they already know the questions that they want to ask,” Cohen said.
I continued, “If [Weisselberg] answers them truthfully—which if he doesn’t, he’s really a fool because he is looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars—will ultimately implicate other people, not just Donald, but other people at the Trump Org and in their business circles as well.”
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On Thursday, Weisselberg was sentenced to five months at the Rikers Island jail complex, although he is eligible for early release, and ordered to pay nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest. He was also sentenced to five years of probation.
Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and campaign-finance violations related to the Mueller report, said Weisselberg’s sentence of five months was “100 percent” too short for the crimes committed, but that the executive had “no choice” but to take the deal, given that he was looking at 15 years.
“Do I think it’s too short? His numbers were higher than mine. I cooperated. I provided over 500 hours of testimony to nine different congressional committees and I got 36 months,” the former lawyer said. Cohen was also disbarred in February 2019 over the results of the investigation.
So far, Weisselberg is the only person to face criminal charges in the long-running investigation into the company.
In response to the plea deal, the Trump Organization released a statement praising the Trump loyalist, who the company said was “persecuted and threatened by law enforcement, particularly the Manhattan district attorney, in their never-ending, politically motivated quest to get President Trump .”
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism