New Republic - One of the witnesses in Donald Trump’s New York business fraud trial admitted Friday that he regularly committed tax fraud.Jeff McConney served as a Trump Organization executive from 1987 until February of this year. He was granted immunity in exchange for helping prosecutors, and has previously admitted to breaking the law to help company executives avoid taxes. On Friday, he shed even more light on what exactly that entailed.
Andrew Amer, a lawyer for the New York state Attorney General’s office, asked McConney whether he had been asked more than once to help Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg commit tax fraud. McConney said yes.McConney also admitted that Weisselberg had told him to process a payroll check for Weisselberg’s wife so she could get Social Security benefits, even though she was not a Trump Organization employee....
McConney also admitted to helping fraudulently inflate the value of multiple Trump Organization real estate assets. One such property was the Seven Springs estate in Westchester, New York. Trump’s son Eric was planning in 2012 to develop the property for seven houses. The houses were valued at $161 million—how much they would be worth if they were immediately available. The Trump Organization did not take into account that the value would actually be lower in the present due to the years it would take to actually build the homes, the cost of building them, and the cost of marketing them. McConney continued to value the homes as producing a $23 million profit for the next three years. In 2015, the homes had not been built, and the Trump Organization instead donated the land rights to conservation, giving the organization the right to a hefty tax deduction. MORE
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