Indicting the Trump Organization Years of investigation and prosecutors come up with a small tax case.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/indicting-the-trump-organization-11625264755?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
Democrats of all stripes have devoted years to investigating Donald Trump and finding very little. The latest example is Thursday’s indictment of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer for classifying employee benefits as business expenses rather than compensation.
Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed millions of documents and years of tax returns, and that’s all they’ve come up with. The indictment lists 15 criminal counts, including second degree grand larceny. But the evidence in the indictment boils down to misreporting compensation to the Internal Revenue Service and New York tax authorities.
Prosecutors allege that Allen Weisselberg, the 73-year-old accountant and CFO, received as much as $1.76 million in compensation over a 16-year-period—for cars, an apartment rental, and tuition for Mr. Weisselberg’s grandchildren at a private school—in a way that kept them off the books for tax purposes. The indictment says he avoided paying $901,112 he owed in taxes and collected federal and state tax refunds of $133,124 he wasn’t entitled to.
If true and willful, this is rotten behavior. But it isn’t Teapot Dome, and disguising compensation as expenses is far from unusual in corporate America. It’s typically handled as a civil matter and settled with the payment of back taxes, interest and fines. It is rarely the basis for a criminal indictment.
The prosecutors are throwing the book at Mr. Weisselberg to get him to turn state’s evidence against the former President. The same goes for the highly unusual decision to indict the Trump Organization, which is presumably intended to squeeze its business prospects. Notably, neither Mr. Trump nor his children who run the business were charged.
The political motives at work are transparent. Mr. Vance has pursued Mr. Trump and his tax records for years, even as street and violent crime proliferates in New York City. Ms. James campaigned on a promise to shine “a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.” She all but promised a selective prosecution—that is, pick a target, then search for a crime to allege.
This is precisely the practice Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson famously warned against in his advice to prosecutors about abusing their vast powers, as our friends at the New York Sun remind us. That temptation is worse when it looks like political targeting.
In 2017 we criticized Mr. Trump for urging his Attorney General to charge Hillary Clinton, saying the push to “prosecute his defeated opponent is the kind of crude political retribution one expects in Erdogan’s Turkey or Duterte’s Philippines.” Mr. Trump’s AGs were wise enough to resist, but some state GOP prosecutors will eventually return Mr. Vance’s favor against a Democratic target.
The expectation among Democrats is that the charges will finally diminish Mr. Trump’s political appeal, but will they? Like impeachments one and two, the case gives Mr. Trump another chance to portray himself as the populist knight taking on the corrupt powers that be. If the charges fail in court, and prosecutors have nothing else, Mr. Trump will claim blanket vindication.
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