Allen Weisselberg knows far more than the president’s former lawyer.
About two months before Election Day in 2016, Donald Trump and his former lawyer (and self-described “fixer”) Michael Cohen were chatting about how to convince a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, to keep quiet about what she described as a long-term affair with the presidential candidate.
“We’ll have to pay,” Cohen said, according to a recording of the conversation that CNN obtained and broadcast Tuesday night.
“Pay with cash,” Trump appears to respond.
“No, no,” Cohen says. Earlier in the conversation Cohen suggested that he “open a company for the transfer of all of that info” to the National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. AMI’s chairman, David Pecker, is a friend of the president and he is also referred to on the tape. The Enquirer had already purchased McDougal’s account of her affair with Trump earlier in 2016 and then never published it. Trump and Cohen appear to be discussing a second payment to McDougal (and there is no indication that it was ever made).
“I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” Cohen tells Trump. “So, I’m all over that. And, I spoke to Allen about it.”
Weisselberg isn’t a bit player in Trumplandia and his emergence on the Cohen- Trump recording – as someone possibly facilitating a scheme apparently meant to disguise a payoff – should worry the president. Weisselberg has detailed information about the Trump Organization’s operations, business deals and finances. If he winds up in investigators’ crosshairs for secreting payoffs, he could potentially provide much more damaging information to prosecutors than Cohen ever could about the president’s dealmaking.
Cohen, of course, already is reportedly being investigated by federal prosecutors in New York for possibly engaging in bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations. To the extent that his legal travails spill over onto the president, it’s worrisome to the White House. But campaign finance violations aren’t likely to be as threatening to Trump as more serious transgressions such as, for example, obstruction of justice or exchanging policy favors for financial gain.
Moreover, Cohen has only worked for Trump since 2006, and he never operated as a traditional lawyer. Instead, he brought potential licensing deals to the president's attention for years and also worked with the career criminal and Trump business partner Felix Sater on a proposal for a Trump project in Moscow. (Sater and Cohen, childhood friends, also paired up to push an initiative to end economic sanctions against Russia imposed because of its military annexation of part of Ukraine; Putin, according to my Bloomberg News colleagues, reportedly discussed a plan to resolve the conflict in Ukraine during his private meeting with Trump in Helsinki last week.)
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Poster Comment:
Allen Weisselberg
Remember that name, we're going to be hearing it often......
