Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is weighing charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, the New York Times reports.
Prosecutors from Vance’s office met with Trump organization attorneys on Thursday, the report says, and charges could come as soon as next week against the company and its CFO Allen Weisselberg.
It’s not clear what the organization would be charged with, though Vance has said publicly that he’s probing the Trump Org over allegations of tax, bank, and insurance fraud. The Times reported that charges could be connected with “fringe benefits” that Weisselberg received.
More specifically, prosecutors have reportedly been turning the screws on Weisselberg, examining whether he received illegal, undeclared, untaxed compensation from the company.
Weisselberg is known as the skeleton key to the company’s internal workings, and has had intimate knowledge of the former president’s business dealings for decades. Prosecutors have reportedly been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to flip him.
Charging Weisselberg would mark a huge escalation in the pressure on him to cooperate, as prosecutors home in on the president’s business practices before he took office.
It would be the first instance of Vance filing charges in the probe, which has been going on for at least two years. The Manhattan DA ended up at the Supreme Court twice while trying to enforce a grand jury subpoena for Trump’s tax returns, which he has since obtained.
Vance has teamed up with New York Attorney General Letitia James in the probe, as they scrutinize perks that allegedly went to Weisselberg and other top executives.
Prosecutors have also focused on allegations first lodged by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who told Congress in 2019 that Trump would inflate the value of his real estate assets for lenders and deflate them for tax purposes.
Vance made oblique references to this portion of the investigation in legal filings over the subpoena, saying that bank, tax, and insurance fraud were all on the table in his office’s investigation.
