Top Trump Executive Sentenced to Five Months in Tax Fraud Case

Longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg cooperated with prosecutors in their case against the former president’s businesses.

Allen Weisselberg

Allen Weisselberg arrives to court, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023, in New York.John Minchillo/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A Manhattan judge has sentenced longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to five months in jail for his role in helping the former president’s businesses evade taxes for much of the last decade. Following the sentencing on Tuesday afternoon, Weisselberg, 75, was taken into custody and transported to New York City’s Rikers Island jail to begin serving his time. Weisselberg was also given five years probation and ordered to pay $2 million in restitution. 

Weisselberg could have faced as much as 25 years in state prison based on the initial charges against him, but last summer he pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his former employer—the Trump Organization. However, he did not agree to testify against his former boss, Trump. Last month a jury found two Trump-owned corporations guilty on nine counts of tax fraud; Trump was not charged personally in the case. The companies will be sentenced later this week, although they have appealed the conviction.

The case centers around a scheme under which Trump’s companies would pay top executives, like Weisselberg, less money in salary, but make up the difference by giving them fancy perks like Mercedes-Benzes, apartments, and even tuition for Weisselberg’s grandchildren. Employees ended up paying lower taxes for the same overall level of take-home compensation. At the trial for the Trump companies, defense attorneys argued that this scheme only benefitted Weisselberg and other executives who received the perks. But prosecutors contended that it actually provided a huge benefit for the Trump Organization, too, because it allowed the companies to boost executives’ pay for about half the cost of a taxable salary increase.

After Weisselberg pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme, Trump kept him on the company payroll—and in fact offered him a large bonus to be paid out following the trial. For much of the run-up to the Trump Organization trial, attorneys on both sides studiously tried to avoid making the case about Trump personally. But almost immediately upon the start of the trial, defense attorneys began referencing Trump—specifically praising him for being generous to Weisselberg even after his guilty plea. This gave prosecutors an opportunity to go after Trump, and they painted a picture of the Trump Organization as a workplace subsumed by a “culture of fraud.”

At one point, prosecutors showed jurors paperwork signed by Trump indicating that he had approved of a request by one employee to reduce that employee’s salary by $75,000—the exact amount of rent the employee would have owed for a Trump-owned apartment he was living in rent-free. 

“Mr. Trump explicitly sanctioning tax fraud! That’s what this document shows!” Manhattan assistant district attorney Joshua Steinglass told the jury.

On Tuesday, as expected, prosecutors endorsed the five-month jail sentence they had negotiated with Weisselberg in exchange for his helpful testimony. Following the formal sentencing by New York judge Juan Merchan, Weisselberg was handcuffed and led away. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate