Here it is. I’ll have more thoughts later, but it broadly alleges a deliberate, 15 year long tax scheme that resorted underreporting $1.7 million in income. There are 15 separate counts of charges.
Charges include conspiracy, tax frauds, grand larceny, and false filings of business and tax records. Quoting from the introduction to the indictment:
“The defendants, in the County of New York and elsewhere, during the period from on or about March 31, 2005, to on or about June 30, 2021, as set forth below, engaged in a scheme constituting a systematic ongoing course of conduct with intent to defraud more than one person and to obtain property from more than one person by false and fraudulent pretenses representations and promises, and so obtained property with a value in excess of one thousand dollars from one or more such persons, to wits the United Sates Internal Revenue Service, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, and the New York City Department of Finance.”
At his arraignment prosecutors alleged the Trump Organization deliberately tried to help Weisselberg conceal his crimes. He has been released, with his passport confiscated.
EDIT & UPDATE
Quoting the last paragraph of the indictment:
“The defendants the Trump Corporation, d/b/a the Trump Organization, and Allen Weisselberg in the County of New York and elsewhere, on or about September 2016, with the intent to defraud, altered, erased, obliterated, deleted, removed and destroyed a true entry in the business records of an enterprise, to wit, Donald J. Trump’s Detail General Ledger, and defendants’ intent to defraud included an intent to commit another crime and to aid and conceal the commission thereof.”
The timing of that is very interesting. Right in the middle of Trump’s campaign, two months prior to the election. Makes you wonder what they were suddenly interested in hiding.
SECOND UPDATE
From paragraph 4 of the Complaint:
“The purpose of the scheme was to compensate Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives in a manner that was “off the books”: the beneficiaries of the scheme received substantial portions of their income through indirect and disguised means, with compensation that was unreported or misreported by the Trump Corporation or TrumpPayroll Corp. to the tax authorities. The scheme was intended to allow certain employees to substantially understate their compensation from the Trump Organization, so that they could and did pay federal, state, and local taxes in amounts that were significantly less than the amounts that should have been paid.”
As you can see there are a lot of plurals there. There are obviously other participants in the scheme, who benefited from it, but who are not named in this indictment. It’s about the strongest hint in the indictment that more are coming.
It certainly leaves one to wonder who those other “executives” of the organization are.
