Prosecutor: Evidence shows Trump 'explicitly' OK'd tax fraud
NEW YORK (AP) — In the end, it wasn't a last-minute smoking gun but a prosecutor insisting that evidence shows Donald Trump was aware of a scheme that his Trump Organization’s executives hatched to avoid paying personal income taxes on millions of dollars worth of company-paid perks.
After telling jurors on Thursday that Trump “knew exactly what was going on" with the scheme, Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Joshua Steinglass followed up by citing trial evidence and testimony that he said made clear “Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.”
Steinglass, speaking on the last day before deliberations at the Trump Organization's criminal tax fraud, showed jurors a lease Trump signed for one executive's Manhattan apartment and a memo the former president initialed authorizing a pay cut for another executive who got perks.
He also cited Weisselberg’s claim, during his three days of testimony, that he told Trump he would pay him back after Trump agreed to cover his grandchildren's hefty private school tuition cost. Weisselberg then adjusted his payroll records to cut his pre-tax salary by the cost of the tuition.
“I mention this all to show that this whole narrative that Mr. Trump was blissfully ignorant is just not real," Steinglass said.
Trump himself is not on trial, as Steinglass reminded jurors, but Judge Juan Manuel Merchan gave him the green light to talk about Trump’s possible awareness of the scheme after the company's lawyers, in their summations, claimed that Trump knew nothing about it.
Trump has denied knowing that Weisselberg and other executives were dodging taxes, writing on his Truth Social platform this week: “There was no gain for ‘Trump,’ and we had no knowledge of it.”
After Steinglass finished Friday, Trump Organization lawyer Michael van...