Donald Trump’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, has pleaded guilty to five counts of perjury in testimony he gave last May and October regarding the civil trial against Trump in Manhattan.
According to Newsmax, Weisselberg will spend 5 months in jail:
Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty Monday in New York to perjury in connection with testimony he gave at the ex-president’s civil fraud trial.
Weisselberg, 76, surrendered to the Manhattan prosecutor’s office earlier Monday and entered state court in handcuffs, wearing a mask, before pleading guilty to five counts of perjury. Prosecutors accused Weisselberg of lying under oath when he answered questions in a deposition in May and at the October trial about allegations that Trump lied about his wealth on financial statements given to banks and insurance companies.
Weisselberg will be sentenced to five months in jail, the judge said.
Weisselberg’s lawyer, Seth Rosenberg, didn’t return a request for comment earlier Monday.
The Daily Beast has much more details on the specific lies that were told by Weisselberg:
According to the plea agreement he signed, Weisselberg acknowledged he wouldn’t be truthful when discussing his involvement in the way Trump repeatedly faked the size of his palatial triplex apartment at Trump Tower. The accountant helped Trump vastly inflate the value of his personal assets by some $200 million when they claimed the three-floor, 10,996 square foot apartment was actually closer to 30,000 square feet.
As part of the plea deal, Weisselberg admitted he lied to the AG during a July 2020 deposition, when he told state investigators that he remained clueless about the real size of the triplex until a journalist called him out on the fabrication.
“We didn’t find out about the error until the Forbes article came out,” he told the AG’s team, according to a transcript cited in court documents.
In reality, DA prosecutors say, emails show that Weisselberg was fielding questions from Forbes reporters and involved with internal discussions about the matter for months.
However, Weisselberg apparently kept up that lie even after he came under the Manhattan DA’s microscope for dodging taxes at the Trump Organization. In 2022, Weisselberg struck a plea deal with the DA and later testified at the criminal trial. But new details first revealed on Monday show that he kept up the act even after his 99-day stint in jail.
In the plea deal, Weisselberg admitted that he lied to the AG during a May 2023 deposition in the run-up to her bank fraud trial, claiming he wasn’t involved in determining the property values that made up Trump’s personal financial statements. Then he lied a third time at the three-month bank fraud trial last fall, when he testified in court on Oct. 10, 2023, that he “never focused on the triplex” and “never thought about that apartment.”
Welp.