Allen Weisselberg, former CFO at the Trump Organization, leaves court in Manhattan after pleading guilty to perjury.
Reuters/Brendan McDermid
On Monday in Manhattan, Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to two state felony counts of perjury.Both lies involved the size of Donald Trump’s Trump Tower penthouse on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.The plea essentially renders the former Trump Org CFO useless as a hush-money trial witness.
Allen Weisselberg had little choice but to plead guilty to perjury after Manhattan prosecutors caught him blatantly lying about lying, as they revealed in court Monday.
And underlying this stack of lies is Trump’s obsession with pretending to banks that he had a massive, gigantic, colossal penthouse — the most expensive apartment, he claimed a decade ago, in New York City history.
Here’s how Weisselberg, Trump’s ever-loyal, former Trump Organization CFO, was inescapably caught repeatedly telling easily provable lies about that penthouse during sworn testimony — ›felonies that will now send him back to jail for up to five months.
It started in 2012
It was in 2012 that Trump was first recorded — in official net-worth statements — wildly exaggerating the size of his penthouse apartment, which spans three floors atop Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
Trump knew the penthouse was 10,996 square feet. He’d signed a real estate record attesting to that size in 1994.
Donald Trump’s signature on a 1994 real estate record that proved he knew how big his own triplex apartment was.
NY Attorney General’s Office/Insider
But in the five years of annual net-worth statements he issued for the years 2012 through 2016, he claimed the apartment was 30,000 square feet.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Trump’s civil fraud trial judge, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, wrote back in September.
“Absurd,” New York Attorney General called Trump’s claim, in his 2015 net-worth statement, that the then 30-year-old apartment was worth $327 million.
She noted that by 2015, no apartment in the city, not even newer or larger ones, had sold for anywhere near that princely sum.
Trump Tower in New York
Thomson Reuters
In the spring of 2017, Trump sat down with a Forbes reporter in a failed attempt to stop the magazine from publishing a bombshell — “Donald Trump has been lying about the size of his penthouse.”
(Four days after learning Forbes was writing the story, Trump went ahead and issued his 2016 net-worth statement anyway, claiming the apartment was 30,000 square feet one last time, according to fraud-trial evidence.)
Weisselberg was at that sit-down with Forbes, assistant Manhattan district attorney Gary Fishman said Monday, during the ex-CFO’s plea hearing.
But in a pretrial deposition conducted in 2020 by the state District Attorney’s office, Weisselberg had denied ever being in the same room as Trump when the triplex’s size was discussed.
He was asked, “Were you ever present when Mr. Trump described the size of his triplex?”
“No,” Weisselberg answered.
Weisselberg’s denial could have protected not only himself but also Trump — if only it had been true.
On Monday, Weisselberg admitted this inescapable deposition falsehood — one that prosecutors may have easily been able to verify with Forbes. Reporters are known to keep notes on who is in the room.
Weisselberg also admitted Monday that he’d lied in the same 2020 AG deposition about the timing of when he knew the 30,000-square-foot valuation was wrong.
“We didn’t find out about the error until the Forbes article came out,” Weisselberg swore under oath, despite the earlier sit-down and extensive pre-story emails between Forbes and Weisselberg concerning the square-footage flub.
Engoron and state officials have contended that the square footage was no accident, and was intentionally inflated by Trump and Weisselberg as far back as 2012.
Read the charges Weisselberg pleaded guilty to here.
Weisselberg’s career as a loyal Trump witness now appears to be over
The last Manhattan jury to hear Weisselberg testify did not believe him. (In finding Trump Org guilty of dodging payroll taxes, they rejected the ex-CFO’s claim that in running the scheme, he’d had purely selfish motives and that those at the top of the ladder — Donald Trump and his two eldest sons — had nothing to do with it.)
Weisselberg could have been a key prosecution witness again later this month, in Trump’s upcoming hush money trial.
That’s the Manhattan criminal trial at which Trump faces anywhere from zero to four years in prison for allegedly lying in business documents to hide a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels made days before the 2020 election.)
But Monday’s perjury plea does not require Weisselberg to cooperate in any way with prosecutors. Instead, Weisselberg’s only obligation between now and his April 10 sentencing is to remain law-abiding and not flee the jurisdiction, or else he’ll face up to seven years in prison.
And prosecutors have already said they do not plan to call Weisselberg as a witness, despite the former CFO’s key role in the paperwork underlying the hush-money payment and its alleged cover-up.
It’s unclear what help, if any, Weisselberg could have been as a hush-money defense witness. The alleged fraud’s underlying documents say what they say, and no testimony could change their contents.
But now, given his official history of lying under oath on Trump’s behalf, it’s unlikely Trump’s side would ever call Weisselberg to the stand, either.
Jury selection in the hush money trial is scheduled to begin March 25, with the trial expected to last six weeks.