Donald Trump was either the dumbest CEO in America, or he participated in a whole lot of crimes. His company’s lawyers are hoping to convince a jury of the first in the criminal prosecution of the Trump Organization underway in Manhattan.
The goal here is to present former CFO Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to charges that he participated in a decades-long scheme to use pre-tax dollars to pay for his apartment, cars, and various other perks, as the lone criminal mastermind seeking to defraud the company. To that end, Weisselberg’s longtime right hand man, comptroller Jeff McConney, spent three days on the witness stand purporting to have thought it was very cool and very legal to keep a second set of secret books documenting the declining balance of top executives’ salaries.
The problem with this strategy, as Daily Beast reporter Jose Pagliery, who has been livetweeting from the courtroom,