Trump Organization Found Guilty on All Counts of Tax Fraud

A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found the Trump Organization guilty on all charges of tax fraud and related crimes, connected to a 15-year scheme wherein top executives were compensated off the books with luxurious secret perks, subsequently enabling them to evade paying taxes.

Two Trump Organization companies—Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp.—were convicted on 17 criminal counts, including scheming to defraud, conspiracy, tax fraud, and falsifying business records. The companies could face a maximum $1.6 million fine when sentenced next month.

Donald Trump, whose presidency benefited greatly from the company, will now be freshly associated with the criminal activity attached to the organization sporting his name as he seeks to regain the presidency.

Though Trump himself evaded any implication in the scheme, prosecutors said it was “sanctioned” and “the practice was known to Mr. Trump.” They have also indicated Trump himself remains under investigation.

The trial centered on testimony from longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who has worked with Trump’s family for nearly 50 years and who was testifying as part of a plea deal. In August, Weisselberg pleaded guilty to evading taxes on nearly $2 million in perks from the company. His testimony detailed the Trump Organization’s tactics to avoid payroll taxes and award high-level executives with perks like lavish apartments, private school tuition, and vehicles.

Numerous documents implicate some level of involvement from Trump. There was even a witness, Jeff McConney, the senior vice president at Trump Corp., who at first implicated Trump in the scheme but then walked back that testimony. McConney’s legal fees are paid for by the Trump Organization.

Meanwhile, Trump is still facing investigations on all sides—on the state and federal level—for his seizure of classified documents after he left the White House, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and the accuracy of the Trump Organization’s financial records and valuations. The guilty verdict for his namesake organization today only adds fuel to the fire driving these investigations.

While the Trump Organization has been found guilty by the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation, the New York attorney general is also pursuing a $250 million civil lawsuit into whether Trump’s asset valuation statements were indicative of fraud. Among financial penalties, Trump and his family could be barred from leading business operations in New York ever again.

This story was updated.

Read more at CNN.

Representative Madison Cawthorn will have to pay more than $15,000 for promoting a cryptocurrency in violation of congressional conflict of interest rules, the House Ethics Committee said Tuesday.

An investigative subcommittee began investigating Cawthorn and his involvement with the cryptocurrency “Let’s Go Brandon,” or LGB Coin, in May. The North Carolina representative repeatedly promoted the coin on social media from December 2021 to March 2022.

The report, submitted a few weeks ago, found “substantial evidence that Representative Cawthorn promoted a cryptocurrency in which he had a financial interest in violation of rules protecting against conflicts of interest.”

According to the report, Cawthorn was not paid for his social media posts about LGB Coin, but in December 2021, he received 180 billion coins, worth more than $150,000, at a cheaper price than what was available to the public. He paid for the coins just a few days before LGB Coin announced it would sponsor a Nascar driver, sending its value up (Nascar later revoked the sponsorship). Cawthorn paid $14,237.49 less than the public price, meaning he received an improper gift from the cryptocurrency. He sold his LGB Coin shares throughout December and January.

The report also found Cawthorn failed to disclose these transactions to the House. It did not, however, find sufficient evidence that he was guilty of insider trading.

The bipartisan Ethics Committee unanimously adopted the report and ordered Cawthorn to pay $14,237.49 to a charitable organization of his choice. He must also pay $1,000 in late fees for his disclosure forms to the Treasury within the next two weeks.

LGB Coin has been accused of being a pump-and-dump scheme, meaning its value is falsely inflated through marketing. Once investors have bought in, giving it actual value (the “pump” part), the scheme organizers will “dump” their shares at a profit. After they sell off their shares, the asset’s value deflates rapidly, revealing it was worthless all along.

Cawthorn was elected in 2020 as an avid Donald Trump supporter, but his time in office has been plagued with scandal. He lost the Republican primary in May and will leave office in January. Multiple reports indicate that both his Washington and North Carolina offices have already been vacated.

In a scathing indictment, police officers ignored Republican leaders during a congressional ceremony Tuesday honoring law enforcement for defending the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy presented the officers with Congressional Gold Medals, Congress’s highest honor. The medals will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol Police headquarters, the Metropolitan Police Department, the Capitol, and the Smithsonian Institution to recognize the hundreds of officers who tried to fend off the insurrection by Donald Trump supporters.

During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, the Democratic and Republican Party leaders stood in a line to greet the medal recipients, who included the parents of officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the riot. The officers and Sicknick family could clearly be seen in video shaking hands with Pelosi and Schumer but simply walking past McConnell and McCarthy.

“They’re just two-faced. I’m just tired of them standing there and saying how wonderful the Capitol Police is, and they turn around and … go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring,” Sicknick’s mother, Gladys Sicknick, said. “It just hurts.”

Sicknick’s brother Ken Sicknick said, “They have no idea what integrity is. They can’t stand up for what’s right and wrong.”

Police officers were brutally attacked during the January 6 riot by Trump supporters trying to overturn the 2020 election. In harrowing testimony, both to Congress and the House January 6 investigative committee, officers described their enduring physical and mental scars, with some detailing near-death experiences.

Two police officers died by suicide in the days after the riot. Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed when an insurrectionist sprayed him with a chemical, and he died the next day. That summer, two more officers took their own lives.

McCarthy and McConnell, both avid Trump supporters while he was in office, have failed to publicly take a firm stance on his involvement in January 6. Although they both condemned the riot, they have been careful to avoid implicating Trump directly. McCarthy has also refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the attack.

McConnell voted to acquit Trump during his historic second impeachment for involvement in the insurrection, and neither man has spoken out against his planned 2024 run for president, implying support.

Congress voted last summer to award the medals. Although the measure passed unanimously in the Senate, 21 House Republicans voted against it.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. Committee Chairman Representative Bennie Thompson confirmed the decision to reporters on Tuesday, according to CNN.

Thompson did not indicate exactly who will be referred. But the committee’s investigations have been extremely comprehensive, potentially implicating a very wide array of individuals. The panel has interviewed over 1,000 people, reviewed over one million documents, and subpoenaed dozens of people including Mark Meadows, Stephen Bannon, Representative Kevin McCarthy, and Donald Trump himself.

The investigation runs concurrently to other probes, including a Georgia-based investigation that has similarly called individuals including Meadows, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others to testify and hand over documents.

Campaigning for Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker over the weekend, Republican Senator John Kennedy stuck to the kinds of kitchen table issues voters would definitely want to hear about as the fate of the Senate is on the line: “woke” people who “walk around with zip-lock bags of kale that they can eat to give them energy.”

“These woke, high-IQ stupid people, they’re easy to recognize. They hate George Washington, they hate Thomas Jefferson, they hate Dr. Seuss, and they hate Mr. Potato Head,” Kennedy began.

“These, these woke, high-IQ stupid people, they walk around, they walk around with zip-lock bags of kale that they can eat to give them energy,” Kennedy said, horrified. “Now, if you wanna eat kale, that’s up to you. I don’t eat kale. You know why? Because kale tastes to me like I’d rather be fat,” he declared proudly.

“And these high-IQ pe—stupid people, the wokers in charge of Washington, D.C., the berserk wing of the Democratic Party—they hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun. They’re all over Washington, D.C.”

Kennedy—a totally not-berserk man not hyperventilating over a person he just made up—is himself ostensibly a fairly intelligent person. He graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University, before receiving a law degree from the University of Virginia and another degree with honors from Oxford.

Kale seems to be a favorite target of Kennedy’s ire (to a much stronger extent than, for example, a former president who incited an insurrection on the nation’s capital, dined with Nazis, and called to terminate the U.S. Constitution).

Last year, as President Joe Biden pushed to close an inheritance-tax loophole—something many “regular” Americans would likely get behind—Kennedy blasted the effort. “This is what happens when you have a president and a Treasury secretary who are on a mission from God to please pink-haired wokers who carry around Ziploc bags of kale.”

Many have wondered where Walker’s dishonest, incoherent, and culture-war-focused candidacy came from. Kennedy’s recent remarks affirm the idea that his candidacy is really nothing more than a weak appendage of the Republican Party.